John Herbert Quick (1861-1925) was an American author, whose works include Vandemark"s Folly (1922), The Hawkeye (1923), The Invisible Woman (1924), and an autobiography, One Man"s Life (1925). Vandemark"s Folly tells the story of Jacobus T. Vandemark, whose widowed mother remarried a patent medicine salesman when he was three. His step-father abused both his wife and her son, putting the boy to work in a cotton mill at six until the boy ran away to work on the Erie Canal under the command of a rough but good-hearted canal boat captain.