When Dennis Michael Quinn passed from this life alone in his condominium on some indeterminate date in late April 2021, Mormon and Utah history lost one of its greatest historians. Among Mormon historians, he was certainly the one who insisted most doggedly on the discovery and assertion of Truth, particularly in what he called the “silent places,” where the facts most inconvenient and embarrassing to received orthodoxy lurked. For that insistence, he paid the highest penalties, over and over again: it cost him his marriage, it cost him his academic career, and ultimately, it cost him his church membership.
Quinn was born in Pasadena, California, on March 27, 1944, and grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Glendale. Childhood and adolescence, for most of us, are difficult times at best, but Quinn had to cope with challenges from which most of us are spared. A broken family,...
