Floyd Dell

Floyd James Dell, born June 28, 1887, in Barry, Illinois, was an American editor, literary critic, novelist, playwright, and poet whose Broadway credits include the play Little Accident, Cloudy with Showers, and Another Interior. He died on July 23, 1969, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Dell grew up in poverty, his family relocating frequently during his childhood. He spent a significant portion of his early years in Quincy, Illinois, where his mother, a former schoolteacher, encouraged his reading habits and he made extensive use of the local library. In 1903 the family moved to Davenport, Iowa, then a cosmopolitan port city with an active literary and intellectual community. Dell attended Davenport High School but left after the summer of 1904 to work as a reporter. During his Davenport years he became an active socialist, began publishing poetry in local papers and national periodicals, and associated with other writers in what became known as the Davenport group. It was also in Davenport that he met Marilla Waite Freeman, the library director, whom he credited as an inspiration and to whom he dedicated several poems and novels. Freeman later served as the model for the character Helen Raymond in his novel Moon-Calf.

In 1908 Dell moved to Chicago, where he became editor and book reviewer for the Chicago Evening Post's Friday Literary Review, a nationally distributed publication described as the leading organ of literary modernism in America at the time. In that role he introduced modernist literature to a broad American readership and promoted the work of writers including Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Carl Sandburg.

Dell relocated to New York City in 1913, becoming a central figure in the pre-war bohemian community of Greenwich Village and managing editor of Max Eastman's radical magazine The Masses. Following the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917, the federal government labeled The Masses treasonable material and charged its staff with obstructing military recruitment, offenses carrying fines of up to ten thousand dollars and twenty years imprisonment. Two separate trials each ended in a deadlocked jury. In 1918 Dell joined Crystal and Max Eastman in co-editing The Liberator, the successor publication to The Masses. During this period Dell also became a member of the Provincetown Players alongside fellow Davenport natives Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook, and his play King Arthur's Socks was the first work performed by that theater group.

Following World War I, Dell shifted his focus to fiction. His debut novel, Moon-Calf, a bildungsroman published by Alfred A. Knopf, became a bestseller, selling 38,500 copies and going through eleven printings by 1920. It appeared within days of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, at a moment when numerous midwestern writers were producing fiction about small-town American life. Dell continued publishing novels, non-fiction, and essays throughout his career. His autobiographical memoir, Homecoming, offers a firsthand account of the social and artistic history of the Midwest and Greenwich Village bohemian life. His Broadway comedy Little Accident, which opened in 1928, was a hit production that was subsequently adapted into a Hollywood film. Dell made his Broadway appearance in 1915 and his writing credits for the stage also include Cloudy with Showers and Another Interior.

In 1935 Dell joined the WPA and the U.S. Information Service, from which he retired after World War II. He had two sons, one of whom, Christopher Dell, became a writer. He also had daughters including Jerri Dell, who serves as the literary executor and archivist of the Dell Collection, and Kathryn Dell Kaufman, as well as a daughter named Mia Dell from his marriage to Kate Kane. In 2015, Dell was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.