The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends
by Benjamin Lawrence Reid
Summary
B. L. Reid's biography follows John Quinn from his 1870 birth in Tiffin, Ohio, the son of Irish immigrant parents, through the University of Michigan and law study at Georgetown and Harvard into a highly successful New York legal practice that gave him, by early middle age, both real wealth and real influence inside Tammany Hall politics. Reid follows Quinn's break from machine politics after his preferred candidate lost at the 1912 Democratic National Convention, a disillusionment the book treats as the hinge that redirected Quinn's considerable energy and money toward collecting and championing modern art and literature instead.
The biography's real subject, once that turn happens, is a network of friendships rather than a single career. It follows Quinn's central role in organizing the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced European modernism to American audiences on a large scale, and his successful campaign to persuade Congress to overturn a tariff that had discouraged American collectors from buying modern foreign art. It follows his patronage of the poet William Butler Yeats, whom he supported from 1902 and helped establish the Abbey Theatre, his championing of Joseph Conrad, whose manuscripts he collected, and above all his financial and editorial support for Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, support that helped Eliot place The Waste Land with an American publisher. Eliot's gratitude took a lasting physical form: in 1923 he sent Quinn the poem's original manuscript, annotated throughout with Pound's editorial cuts, a document that then disappeared from view for more than four decades. Reid follows Quinn to his death from cancer in 1924, at fifty four, and to the 1927 auction that dispersed his enormous collection, Matisses and Picassos and Brancusis scattered across American museums, exactly as Quinn had directed in a will written when he still expected to have decades left to keep collecting.
The biography suits a reader more interested in how modernism actually reached American audiences, through one wealthy lawyer's taste and money and friendships, than in literary history told purely through the writers themselves.
Historical Context & Significance
Oxford University Press published The Man from New York in 1968, and it won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Its publication coincided almost exactly with a genuine literary event: the Waste Land manuscript Quinn had received from Eliot in 1923, which had passed with the rest of Quinn's papers into the Berg Collection, was rediscovered at the New York Public Library's Berg Collection in 1968, confirming much of what Reid's account of the Quinn Eliot friendship had described.
Reid, a professor for decades at Mount Holyoke College, went on to write further literary biography, including a study of the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement that was a National Book Award finalist in 1977, but The Man from New York remained his most honored book, valued particularly for recovering a patron whose influence on early twentieth century literature had been real but, until Reid's research, only partially documented.