Dell, Floyd

DELL, FLOYD (1887-1969). One of the central figures of the Chicago literary renaissance and Greenwich Village bohemianism of the early twentieth century, Floyd Dell was a writer whose advocacy of feminism, socialism, psychoanalysis, and progressive education shocked the American bourgeoisie. His novels, plays, essays, and bohemian life came to epitomize the Greenwich Village avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s. Managing editor of the radical Masses magazine, Dell was tried twice for sedition for publishing subversive literature. As both editor and critic, Dell's influence lived on in the works of many major American writers.

Floyd James Dell was born in Barry, Illinois on July 28, 1997. He lived in Quincy, Illinois for a large portion of his childhood. Encouraged by his mother, Dell became a voracious reader, spending much of his time in the local library. At sixteen, he moved with his family to Davenport, Iowa and dropped out of high school to work in a candy factory at a job to which he was ill suited and fired almost immediately. Unsure what to do next, he took a job sweeping floors at the local newspaper, where he was quickly promoted to cub reporter. Having been brought up in poverty, Dell took an early interest in politics and social change and by the age of sixteen had joined the Socialist Party. He moved on through a string of jobs writing and promoting for Socialist publications such as Davenport’s Tri-City Worker.

In 1908, Floyd Dell moved to Chicago where he took a position with the Chicago Evening Post and by 1911 was the editor of its Friday Literary Review (FLR), a nationally distributed weekly supplement. During his five years at the FLR, Dell critiqued the writing of Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, Tom Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Anatole France, O. Henry, Emma Goldman, Carl Sandberg and dozens of others. These were authors who, in his opinion, realistically depicted an increasingly industrialized and materialistic American society. In his reviews, he examined the origin and development of the socialist movements in the United States and Europe and offered enduring historical insight. Dell would become an unequivocally prominent figure in the literary movement later known as American Modernism.

As early as 1912, Dell established a reputation as a vociferous champion of the woman's movement. In 1972, Fanny Butcher wagered that Dell "would have been patron saint to today's Women's Liberation for the series of articles he wrote about the Free Woman . . . Floyd's articles caused a terrific uproar, especially those in which he advocated sexual freedom for women." Dell was fascinated by feminism and the ways in which it was changing the world. In 1913, his book Women as World Builders -- a series of essays about Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emmeline Pankhurst, Jane Addams, Olive Schreiner, Isadora Duncan, Beatrice Webb, Emma Goldman, Margaret Dreier Robins, Ellen Key, and Dora Marsden-- introduced feminism to a largely uninformed audience.

Relocating to New York City in 1913, Dell became a leader of the pre-war bohemian community in Greenwich Village. He was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, a collective of playwrights and other artists who sought a perspective different from that of mainstream American theater. The group came to represent the "Little Theatre" movement of writers who preferred experimental to traditional theater and smaller, intimate productions to spectacle and commercialism.

In 1914, he joined Max Eastman’s Masses magazine as managing editor. From its inception in 1911, the Masses was well-known for its political articles and Socialist perspective. Dell opened its pages to talented writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, as well as illustrations and cartoons by leading radical figures of the day.

Following passage of the Espionage Act of 1917, the government officially labeled the magazine "treasonable material" and issued charges against its staff for "unlawfully and willfully . . . obstructing the recruiting and enlistment of the United States' military.” Dell and his co-defendants were tried twice for sedition and faced fines up to $10,000 and twenty years in prison. At the trial, one paragraph of Dell's writing was cited as an "overt act" in violation of the Espionage law: "there are some laws that the individual feels he cannot obey, and he will suffer any punishment, even that of death, rather than recognize them as having authority over him. This fundamental stubbornness of the free soul, against which all the powers of the State are helpless, constitutes a conscientious objection, whatever its source may be in political and social opinion." Both trials ended in hung juries. Dell and his co-defendants were set free.

From 1920 to 1933, Dell published eleven novels, including Janet March, banned in 1923 by the Watch and Ward Society for its reference to Janet’s atheism and lack of repentance after an abortion. During this period, he also wrote several books of non-fiction, including Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism (1913), Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest (1927), Love in the Machine Age: A Psychological Study of the Transition from Patriarchal Society (1936), and an autobiography, Homecoming (1931). He co-edited Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1927) and edited John Reed’s Daughter of the Revolution and Other Stories (1929).

In the mid-1930s, Dell moved to Washington, DC where he worked on Federal Writers Project and wrote speeches for Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and retired in 1947.

Dell, Floyd. Homecoming. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933.

Clayton, Douglas. Floyd Dell – The Life and Times of an American Rebel. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 1994

Sutter, R. Craig. Floyd Dell: Essays from the Friday Literary Review, 1909 – 1913. Chicago: December Press, 1996.

Floyd James Dell. Publications. Internet Archive.