Nathaniel Mary Quinn remembers drawing the fluid black outline of a cowboy on the drab walls of the apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes where he lived as a child. In the concrete public housing high-rise, adventures came to life, carefully copied from the pages of his favorite comic books. His father, an illiterate gambler from Mississippi, taught him how to draw on brown paper bags from the neighborhood grocery store.
Quinn was the youngest of five boys. His mother, crippled after suffering two strokes, managed to support her family with disability checks from the government. He remembers the constant struggle to pay the bills. “I imagine the rent was maybe 50 dollars a month, and the people who lived in the projects struggled to pull together 50 dollars each month.” In the winter, the family would often turn on the oven to heat the apartment to avoid paying the electric bill.
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