Kennedy calls his novels "cycles" to emphasize their open-endedness, and the interconnections between setting, characters, incidents, and themes. First the time frame connects Quinn's Book with the other cycle novels. While The Ink Truck (1969) is set in the 1960s and Legs (1975; see separate entry), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game(1978), and Ironweed (1983; see separate entry) are set in the 1920s and 1930s, Quinn's Book is set in the mid 1800s, and thus helps to set the stage for the later novels. In addition,Quinn's Book connects with the other novels through historical incidents: Albany's great fire of August 17, 1848; the Civil War; the 1863 draft riots; the cholera epidemics; and the Hudson River's periodic flooding of Broadway. Bailey's reveries in The Ink Truck take him to Albany's past and the cholera epidemic; in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Jake Berman says his grandfather had been thrown out a window during the...