Daniel Quinn

Daniel Quinn was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He went on to study at Saint Louis University, at the University of Vienna, Austria, through IES Abroad, and at Loyola University, receiving a bachelor's degree in English cum laude in 1957. He delayed part of this university education, however, while a postulant at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky. In 1975, Quinn left his career as a publisher to become a freelance writer. He is best known for his book Ishmael (1992), which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991. Quinn went into publishing, abandoned his Catholic faith, and married twice unsuccessfully, before marrying Rennie MacKay Quinn. Ishmael became the first of a loose trilogy of novels by Quinn, including The Story of B and My Ishmael. He became a well-known author to followers of the environmental, simple living, and anarchist movements, although he did not strongly self-identify with any of these. Quinn's book Tales of Adam was released in 2005 after a long bankruptcy scuffle with its initial publisher. Quinn first explores the idea of animism as the original worldwide religion and as his own dogma-free belief system in The Story of B. He died of aspiration pneumonia in hospice care in February 2018.