Daniel Quinn - Biography

Biography

Daniel Quinn was born in Omaha, Nebraska, where he graduated from Creighton Preparatory School. He went on to study at Saint Louis University, at 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, where he hoped to become a Trappist monk; however his spiritual director, Thomas Merton, ultimately felt Quinn was not a good candidate for the monkhood and consequently ended Quinn's postulancy. Quinn then went into publishing, abandoned his Catholic faith, and underwent two unsuccessful marriages.

In 1975, he left his career as a publisher to become a freelance writer. Quinn is best known for his book Ishmael (1992), which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991. This fellowship was established to encourage authors to seek "creative and positive solutions to global problems." Ishmael became the first of a trilogy of novels by Quinn loosely connected by the same fictional universe, including The Story of B and My Ishmael. Ishmael and its sequels brought ever-increasing fame to Quinn throughout the 1990s, and he became a very well-known author to certain segments of the environmental, simplicity, anarchist, and anarcho-primitivist movements, though Quinn himself does not explicitly align with any of these movements. The Pearl Jam song "Do the Evolution" was inspired by Ishmael as were some aspects of the 1999 film Instinct; however, the producers of Instinct made it more for box office ratings than philosophy and Quinn has personally claimed that the film bears "virtually no resemblance to the book." Quinn has traveled widely to lecture and discuss his books.

While response to Ishmael was mostly very positive, Quinn inspired a great deal of controversy with his claim (most explicitly discussed in the appendix section of The Story of B) that since population growth is a function of food supply, sustained food aid to impoverished nations merely puts off and dramatically worsens a massive population-environment crisis. This crisis is born of a disconnect between local humans and the local habitat with its food. Quinn claims that ending this disconnect is a proven way to avoid famines.

In 1998 Quinn collaborated with environmental biologist Alan D. Thornhill, PhD, in producing Food Production and Population Growth, a 2 hour 40 minute video (later DVD) elaborating in depth the ideas presented in his books.

Quinn's book Tales of Adam was released in 2005 after a long bankruptcy scuffle with its initially scheduled publisher. It is designed to be a look through the animist's eyes in seven short tales; Quinn explores the idea of animism as the first worldwide religion and as his own belief system in The Story of B and his autobiographical Providence.

In 2010, James Jay Lee, the perpetrator of the Discovery Communications headquarters hostage crisis, cited Quinn's novel 'My Ishmael in his manifesto of demands. Quinn characterized Lee as a "fanatic" who had distorted his ideas.

Related authors include Jean Liedloff, Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan, Edward Goldsmith, Charles Eisenstein, and Fredy Perlman.

Quinn currently lives in Houston, Texas with his third wife, Rennie.