[In the following interview, Quinn discusses Banished Children of Eve and his identity as an Irish American.]

Irish history, New York history and Civil War history are the three topics that most interest Peter Quinn. Put all three together, add a dollop of fiction, set the stage with a wide range of characters, hold them all together with writing reminiscent of William Faulkner and you have Banished Children of Eve, a novel set in New York in 1863 before and during the draft riots, that is so powerful and colorful and full of history that it is sure to put Quinn, 47, on a course for the rest of his life.

Insiders will know Quinn as the editor of The Recorder, the journal of the American Irish Historical Society, and have been waiting for this novel for years. Other will know him as a speechwriter for Governors Carey and Cuomo and now Time Warner, and may be surprised at his latent talent for novel writing.

Quinn, who wanted to write a novel since he was 12, does not regret the 15 years as a speechwriter, in fact, perhaps there wouldn't be a novel if it wasn't for his day job. "The one thing that you learn being a speechwriter is that you don't wait for the muse to come. If the governor is down the hall you get to it," he says.

Each day as he took the subway in from Brooklyn, to arrive at his workplace two hours early to write, he would look out over South Street where in the years 1845–46 alone 85,000 Irish landed. He would picture his ancestors mingling with the crowd on the dock and wonder what life was really like for them—these banished children seeking to find the promised land.

He considered writing a social history, and whenever he could he would wander around the Lower East Side where his grandmother had lived and worked as a seamstress. As part of the research process he read Adrian Cook's Armies of the Street about the Draft Riots which contained the records of people killed, one of whom was a Peter Quinn: 55-year-old laborer, and "it happened," he says. "In some way the characters came alive and they told me who they were. I didn't start out with a graph and say this is what's going to happen. I started with a general idea that the riot would reveal people—the riot would tell you.

"Writing a novel you have to brood a lot. My daughter would say, 'Daddy are you sad?' And I would say, 'No honey I'm just brooding.' Because I wanted these people to tell me what happens.

"When I first started to do the research I would look at prints and lithographs. And they looked so clean—the dirt and grime wasn't there, and that was something I wanted to bring out in the book. These aren't quaint people. They are as real as we are. With our complexities and our contradictions."

[Harty]: Which of these characters did [you] feel closest to?

[Quinn]: Maybe Margaret.

Is she an ancestor?

Margaret is a combination of different people. I wanted her to be earthy, and the earthy side of my family is my mother's side. My father's side were all rural puritans. The women were much more capable of talking about sexuality than men.

There's a subtle but powerful moment in the book when Margaret is called Brigid by the man of the house, and she says, "It's Margaret, sir. Me name."

That's the ultimate contempt. It's not that the rich look down on them—it's that they are not there—the faceless poor.

Walt Whitman used the term invisible man about the blacks. And you see references in the 19th century to Irish maids as Brigids, that's the name they gave them, and there's terrible contempt in there.

So really the Irish and the blacks have a lot in common?

Yes. I think they have an incredible amount in common. In the 1830s the Irish were almost all rural people, peasants. Fifty years later when you are talking about urban machines in the United States you are talking about the Irish. There was this tremendous transfer from the land to the city in a kind of panic, and the same thing happened in the black migration.

Today when you talk about urban youth you are talking about blacks. Their entry into power is through politics rather than through business, which is the Irish experience. The Irish in Ireland had a folk culture and the church. That's what gave them their dignity and their sense of organization. And you have the same thing with blacks. A fundamental institution that reflects who they are and a folk culture. And also the role of women. The women are the strongest part of both cultures.

At the end of the book the Irish have been allowed in. They have their own university [Fordham]. But the blacks are gone. You had black people who had lived in New York for over 100 years being driven out of the city.

And in the end of Banished Children, the question is still a racial question. We have admitted these immigrants but these banished children [the blacks] haven't been allowed in. There is a really bloody, violent, disturbing history of what we have done to immigrants, but in the end we have admitted most of them—after the anti-Semitism and after the anti-Catholicism—but blacks are still in question.

Because we Irish always want to present the lace curtain was it hard to look at this other side of our history?

Yes. I found when I first read the accounts of the draft riots—the lynching of blacks and the sexual mutilations—it was hard for me to think about, to understand. But one thing you have to realize is that there's only one mob in history. It doesn't matter if it's Irish or it's the red guard. When people get together en masse and they lose their individuality, they are capable of doing anything. It's not just Irish. What is a tragedy is what's happening to the blacks in the cities, and what happened to the Irish in the cities in the 1860s is a tragedy. These people are 15 years removed from the Famine and it's a class struggle about which group is going to wind up at the bottom and that's what I try and say in the book. The tragedy is that the people at the bottom are fighting each other. If you want to understand American urban life in the 1990s you have to look at Los Angeles—here you have the city of the future and it blows up.

Look at New York in 1863—this ferocious explosion—the Draft Riots—and the poverty it came out of, and look at New York now and see the poverty and the squalor and the new immigrants, and it may seem hopeless, but I would want people to come away from my book with a sense of hope that along with people's pain and struggle there's this life, this vibrancy, and ambition that is the heart of New York and it's bigger and stronger than the poverty and the struggle. The genius and curse of New York is that nothing is going to stay the same.

Why this interest in the Irish?

Because I am third generation. My father didn't have to ask himself those questions, because he lived in an essentially Irish American community. There was the church, and the party, and the unions. That all dissolved in my lifetime. And you wanted to know what it was all about, just as you are about to leave it all behind. My mother is surprised at my interest in all of this. She thinks of herself as Irish American but moving into America, shedding this identity.

All the Irish studies programs have started in my lifetime. When I was a kid the Irish study program was parochial and Catholic education—that was what it meant to be Irish. I would say it's only since the seventies you have this systematic examination of the Irish American experience—how does it relate to Ireland? Who are we? As Ireland's role in the world is more obvious Irish Americans are asking themselves who they are. In one way after 130 years of emigration there is still a lot of Irishness left.

Irish people are surprised by this, to them you're American.

I was brought up in the Bronx where no one was brought up to think of themselves as American. You were Irish, you were Jewish or Italian, and then I went to school, for three months, in Galway and they didn't think I was Irish at all. And when I was a teacher in Kansas and they thought of me as a New Yorker rather than an American. I was an Irish New Yorker and I was caught—between two worlds. Ireland and America—both parts of me. And that's what this book is about, both parts.

Where do you see the Irish now?

I don't think you could say they are in one place. They have achieved economic success but they haven't told their story yet. And I think artists are just emerging like William Kennedy who are finally beginning to produce a body of Irish American literature. The Irish are such a big presence in America but the literature reflecting that presence isn't there. There's James T. Farrell, and writers with Irish names who don't write about Irish things like F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara. But really, the first great Irish Catholic novelist in this century is James Joyce. There aren't a lot of great Irish Catholic voices before that.

It may sound pretentious but Ulysses is the only book I ever read three times. There are several things in there [Banished Children] that I steal right from Joyce. Like the citizen in the bar—the cyclops. And Bedford on the toilet is Bloom on the toilet, but I didn't want anyone to think I was stealing without paying homage, so it opens in June 1904, which is the month of Ulysses. I wanted people to know that this is a tribute to the master. It is such a tremendous book to read even to this day, because it says you can try anything, any voice. I wanted a black character—a black woman, but then I said this is a pretty presumptuous thing to try to do. But I said a prayer to James Joyce and just let go.