The bildungsroman technique develops the love story about Daniel Quinn and Maud Fallon. In tracing the characters' rites of passage from adolescence to maturity,Quinn's Book opens when Quinn is fourteen and Maud is about twelve; when the plot ends, Quinn is twenty-nine and Maud is about twenty-six. In between, Maud's rites of passage emphasize various aspects of the show business world in the 1840s and 1860s. As a journalist, Quinn's rites of passage center on historical events. Quinn's Book belongs to those American novels dealing with the rites of passage of its young characters, a literary tradition that goes back to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885; see separate entry) and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925; see separate entry) and forward to J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951; see separate entry) Winston Groom's Forrest Gump (1986), and John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989; see...