In the 1925 Year Book of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Richard Campbell wrote of John Quinn, "Whatever he did in life, he did with passionate intensity. If it was worth doing at all he considered it to be worth all of the exact thought, the penetrating precision that long training and experience could command." The echo of William Butler Yeats's poem "Second Coming" (1921) in Campbell's first sentence is apt because Quinn assembled a virtually complete collection of Yeats's manuscripts and first editions to 1923. An avid book lover throughout his life, Quinn built a library filled with the most important manuscripts of the early twentieth century, most notably T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses (both published in 1922) and most of Joseph Conrad's pre-World War I fiction. Not just a collector, Quinn acted as patron, literary agent, and-when necessary-attorney for...