Resurrecting local '20s icon through literature

TIFFIN --- Guest speaker Kathleen Dixion Donnelly, Ph.D. visited Tiffin Tuesday for a lecture on the life of Tiffin native John Quinn. The Tiffin-Seneca Public Library and the Heidelberg University English Department co-host the John Quinn Lecture Series. The lecture was titled '"Such Friends": Quinn's Close Circle of Artists & Writers.' Donnelly shared her research on the clique of artists, writers, and publishers that Quinn met in salons in both Ireland and New York in the early 1920s. Quinn was born in Tiffin in 1870. His father, James Quinn, built and operated a bakery in the Quinn Block in Fostoria. His sister was a nun in Tiffin. The lecture series describes him as a "collector of Modern Art and a lawyer for many famous authors, including James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats." Donnelly is the author of '"Such Friends': the Literary 1920s." A new book in the series is published each year featuring important dates in the lives of writers from the Roaring '20s. She opened the lecture by remarking, "Never in my fantasies did I believe that I'd get to be in a room of people who have heard of John Quinn." Quinn was close personal friends with Irish author James Joyce, whose 1922 novel "Ulysses" is considered by Penguin Books to be one of the most influential books of the 1920s. When the novel was being banned in the United States, Quinn secured Joyce a publishing house in Paris and helped to smuggle copies of it to private distributors. Quinn was also an impressive lawyer who enjoyed sponsoring theatre and art. Donnelly noticed him during her research because, "He'd be in the pictures, but wasn't really in the biographies at all. He's always looking directly at the camera like 'Ha! I'm here, I made it.'" Quinn was buried in the graveyard at St. Wendelin in Fostoria. A Celtic Cross marks his grave. Donnelly's books are composed of articles from her blog: www.suchfriends.wordpress.com. Her books are available through PanYan Bookstore downtown. The fourth edition, chronicling the events of 1924, will be available in January. The title of her work comes from the final line in a poem by William Butler Yeats. Tuesday marks 100 years since it was announced that Yeats would receive the Nobel Prize for literature. The host of the evening was Barry Devine, an Irish literature scholar and professor of English at Heidelberg. Devine founded the series in the fall of 2020 under the sponsorship of Brooks and Jean Warren Geckler. The last lecture, in March of this year, discussed censorship and banned books with a panel of authors and scholars. Devine is excited to "resurrect the memory of this influential figure in Art and Literature"