Short biography of the early 20th Century writer and peaceful radical.
Early Years
If you were a writer, poet, artist or any sort of free spirit during the early decades of the 20th century, most likely you were familiar with Floyd Dell. Author and critic, Dell was born in 1887 and grew up along the Mississippi River, first in Barry and Quincy, Illinois, then later in Davenport, Iowa. His father was a butcher and his mother a schoolteacher, but due to economic downtrends it became painfully clear to Floyd—even as a child—that his family was very poor. Christmas was not acknowledged, meals were often scant, and the holes in the bottoms of Floyd’s shoes were patched with cardboard.
Always imaginative and precocious, Dell read insatiably as a boy and by his late teens had joined the Socialist party. While working at various factory jobs to add to his family’s income, Floyd discovered the wide variety of immigrant laborers hoping to join together to create a less class-conscious world. This exposure to radical ideas along with Dell’s love of great authors and poets soon formed his sense of aesthetic obligation. He wanted to use his words to bring about change and break down barriers of repression and inhibition. Floyd Dell had decided he had a mission.
Chicago and Greenwich Village
In 1908, Dell moved to where most Midwestern young men of ambition went: the teeming metropolis of Chicago. He was surprised to find the city full of culture and bright minds, not just corruption and slaughterhouses, and quickly met others willing to discuss his many theories and ideas. Soon he had married and found work at the Friday Literary Review, and by 1912 it was unquestionable that Floyd Dell’s essays and critiques in that publication were shaping Chicago’s artistic mindset. He praised Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson at a time when not every critic was likely to do so, and he was part of a community of bohemians who believed in freedom and personal expression. As Dell himself said, “We were in love with life, and willing to believe almost any modern theory which gave us a chance to live our lives more fully.” However, following the break-up of his marriage and a feeling that he was playing too much of a hollow role, Dell left Chicago for New York where he began his next chapter, in Greenwich Village as one of the editors of the radical magazine the Masses.
Dell easily became a member of the pre-World War I Village scene and resumed his bohemian tendencies, along with writing pertinent essays and reviews. His colleagues and friends at the time included John Reed and Max Eastman, and Dell also found himself drawn into an affair with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, a relationship that both parties seemed to find mutually frustrating. In 1918 Dell was embroiled in a case brought against the Masses for distributing seditious literature. The United States was now at war and found the content of the magazine to be objectionable and criminal. Two trials were held, and in the end Dell was surprised to find that the American justice system had worked in his favor and that neither he nor the other members of the Masses staff would be spending the next several years in prison.
After being drafted and narrowly escaping military service, Dell decided to get serious about his life and his writing. He finished his first novel Moon-Calf, published in 1920 and received with great success, and he married B. Marie Gage, a young woman with an equally radical spirit but also with a commitment to starting the family Floyd now desired. By the 1920s Dell had left Greenwich Village, which he felt had become a tourist trap, and moved to a house near the Hudson River. He continued to write fiction and non-fiction, had two sons, and settled into domesticity. In 1923 he found himself back in trouble over censorship issues due to his novel Janet March, with its heroine who enjoys several premarital love affairs, then has an abortion without any major moral consequences. Even in the liberated 1920s, this message caused public outrage, and just a few months after its initial explosive appearance, no further copies of the book were printed.
Later Years and Legacy
After some success with a Broadway play, Dell found himself forced to take a position with the Works Progress Administration under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While not initially thrilled with the job and essentially accepting it to support his family, Dell did well in Washington and was able to put his political and social enthusiasms, along with his well-organized writing skills, to good use. He also published an autobiography entitled Homecoming in 1933. And while the second half of Floyd Dell’s life may not have seemed as exciting as the first, he took pride in his home life and in the fact that he was able to celebrate a golden wedding anniversary with his wife. Once quite the romantic philanderer, Dell described five decades of marriage as “goddamn hard work!”—yet clearly worthwhile.
Floyd Dell died in 1969 in Maryland, having found a quiet corner of the world, yet while along the way also having blazed many trails for himself and others.
Sources
- Floyd Dell, The Life and Times of An American Rebel, Douglas Clayton (Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 1994)
- WhosWho Chicago: Floyd Dell – CenterstageChicago.com
- Floyd Dell - Time Magazine, May 28, 1923
