Daniel Clarence Quinn was an American author, primarily known as a novelist and fabulist, cultural critic, and publisher of educational texts. He was born on October 11, 1935, in Omaha, Nebraska, and passed away on February 17, 2018, in Houston, Texas.

Quinn is best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991. The novel was published the following year and is widely appreciated for its philosophical insights. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy. Instead, Quinn referred to his philosophy as "new tribalism."

Quinn had a successful career in publishing before dedicating himself to writing. He was the head of the Biography & Fine Arts Department of the American Peoples Encyclopedia and later worked in educational publishing, ending as Editorial Director of The Society for Vision Education.