The Name Quin
Quin comes from my grandfather, Mike Quin, which was itself a pen name. He was born Paul William Ryan.
In the 1930s and '40s he was a San Francisco labor writer. He wrote for the People's World, but his real allegiance was to the voiceless: the dockworkers, farmhands and laborers who built this country with their hands and their blood and rarely got a word in about how it was run.
He collected his columns in Dangerous Thoughts (1940) and More Dangerous Thoughts (1941). He also wrote The Enemy Within (1941) and The Big Strike, his account of the 1934 waterfront strike, published in 1949. Under a second pen name, Robert Finnegan, he wrote three noir novels for Simon & Schuster, including The Lying Ladies and The Bandaged Nude. His work is held in the Library of Congress.
Walter Winchell called him one of the most dangerous men in America, mostly for arguing that the men working the docks deserved a fair share of what they produced. Pancreatic cancer took him in 1947, at forty-one.
His wife, my grandmother Mary King O'Donnell, was a novelist who wrote about people and the human condition. Houghton Mifflin published Those Other People in 1946. It is a whole novel that takes place in a single day in the French Quarter, and it gives its ordinary people the attention most books save for heroes. She went on to write A Peculiar Thing and You Can Hear the Echo, a book about the Kennedy assassination told from the perspective of ordinary people.
I never got to know my grandfather, and I knew my grandmother only as a small boy. But I inherited their love of writing and their instinct to champion the ordinary person. My intention is to carry both forward: his fight for the voiceless, and her attention to what it is to be human.