Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was born at Bodmin on 21 November 1863, the son of a Cornish doctor, and a Devon mother. He was educated at Newton Abbot and Clifton College before going up to Trinity College Oxford in 1882. After his degree and an extra year at Oxford lecturing in classics he took up journalism in London and published his first novel, Dead Man's Rock (Cassell, 1887), using the pseudonym Q which he had first adopted at Oxford. For the next five years he struggled financially, and, after marrying Louisa Amelia Hicks of Fowey in 1887, he returned to a harbourside house in her home town in 1892. There he remained settled for more than half a century, writing more than sixty books, including novels, short stories, literary criticism and poetry. Not least among his achievements was editing The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford, 1900). He was knighted in 1910, and was appointed Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University two years later, where he had helped to establish the undergraduate study of English literature. He died at Fowey (of which town he had been elected mayor in 1937) on 12 May 1944, and was buried there.
From the guide to the Papers of Arthur Quiller-Couch, c1903, (University of Exeter)
