Susan Quinn
Susan Quinn grew up in Chillicothe, Ohio, and graduated from Oberlin College. She began her writing career as a newspaper reporter on a suburban daily outside of Cleveland, following two years as an apprentice actor at the Cleveland Playhouse. In 1967, she published her first book under the name Susan Jacobs: a nonfiction account of the making of a Broadway play called On Stage (Alfred A. Knopf). In 1972, after moving to Boston, she became a regular contributor to an alternative Cambridge weekly, The Real Paper, then a contributor and staff writer on Boston Magazine. In 1979, she won the Penney-Missouri magazine award for an investigative article for Boston Magazine on dangerous cargo transported through the city, and the Golden Hammer Award from the National Association of Home Builders for an investigative article on home inspections. She has written articles for many publications, including the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and Ms. Magazine.
In 1987, she published her first biography, A Mind of Her Own; The Life of Karen Horney (Simon and Schuster, Addison-Wesley and Perseus) for which she received the Boston Globe's Laurence L. Winship Award.
For her next book, Marie Curie: A Life, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation writing residency at Bellagio in Italy. A reviewer in Science magazine predicted that her book "is certain to be this generation's biography of Marie Curie.” Marie Curie was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was on the short list for the Fawcett Book Prize in England. It has been translated into eight languages, and was awarded the Elle Grand prix des lectrices in 1997.
In 2001, Quinn published Human Trials: Scientists, Investors and Patients in the Quest for a Cure. It was described as a “real-life thriller” by the New York Daily News. Human Trials was chosen by Library Journal as one of the best sci-tech books of 2001.
Susan Quinn has lectured all over the United States, and has spoken in France and Poland about her biography of Marie Curie. In 2000, the University of Wisconsin at Stout awarded her a Doctorate of Humane Letters.
Quinn has served as the Chair of PEN New England, a branch of the writers’ organization PEN International. She is an accomplished flutist, and continues to participate in chamber groups on a regular basis. Susan is married to a psychoanalyst, Daniel Jacobs and has two children and four grandchildren. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts just outside of Boston.
“It is the very essence of art,' she [Hallie Flanagan:] told a group gathered in Washington . . ., 'that it exceed bounds, often including those of tradition, decorum, and that mysterious thing called taste. It is the essence of art that it shatter accepted patterns, advance into unknown territory, challenge the existing order. Art is highly explosive. To be worth its salt it must have in that salt a fair sprinkling of gunpowder.”
“In the final scene of Power, the Supreme Court justices appear as a striking abstraction: Nine scowling masks line up in a row on top of a giant podium. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes speaks the majority opinion: 'Water power, the right to convert it into electric energy, and the electric energy thus produced constitute property belonging to the United States.”
“When the Chief Justice read me the oath,' he [FDR] later told an adviser, 'and came to the words "support the Constitution of the United States" I felt like saying: "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy--not the kind of Constitution your Court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy.”
“Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”