Seabury Quinn
American lawyer, journalist, and author (1889–1969)
Seabury Grandin Quinn (also known as Jerome Burke; January 1, 1889 – December 24, 1969) was an American government lawyer, journalist, and pulp magazine author, most famous for his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, published in Weird Tales.
Biography
Seabury Quinn was born January 1, 1889, in Washington, D.C. In 1910 Quinn graduated from the law school of the National University and was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar.
Quinn served in the Army in World War I. After his service he became editor of a group of trade papers in New York, where he taught medical jurisprudence and wrote technical articles and pulp magazine fiction.
His first published work was "The Law of the Movies", in The Motion Picture Magazine, December 1917. (His story "Painted Gold" may have been written earlier.) "Demons of the Night" was published in Detective Story Magazine on March 19, 1918, followed by "Was She Mad?" on March 25, 1918. He published "The Stone Image" in 1919. He introduced Jules de Grandin as a character in 1925 (taking the character's surname from his own middle name), and continued writing stories about him until 1951. The longest of the de Grandin stories is the 1932 novel-length story The Devil's Bride, strongly influenced by Robert W. Chambers' 1920 novel The Slayer of Souls.
In 1937 he returned to Washington to represent a chain of trade journals, and there subsequently became a government lawyer for the duration of World War II. He alternated between law and journalism all his life. He published over five hundred short stories.
“Seabury Quinn” enters the record as american lawyer, journalist, and author (1889–1969). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Seabury, Quinn and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q951250. VIAF identifies the subject as 71396568. The Library of Congress control number is no96039070. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1889, 1969, 1910 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Seabury Quinn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.