Floyd Dell

From Philosopedia

Dell, Floyd (28 June 1887 - 23 July 1969)

Dell became a novelist and radical journalist whose fiction examined the changing mores in sex and politics among American bohemians before and after World War I.

A precocious poet, he was the son of Anthony Dell and was born in Pike County, Missouri. He grew up in an impoverished family and dropped out of high school in Davenport, Iowa, at age 16 to work in a factory. Also at 16 he joined the Socialist Party.

According to Spartacus,

After a spell as an apprentice candy-maker Dell worked as a cub-reporter for the Davenport Times. He later moved to the Chicago Evening Post and by 1911 was editor of the newspaper's Friday Literary Review. Over the next few years Dell promoted the work of writers such as Frank Norris, Jack London, Charles Edward Russell, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. Dell believed that the everyday life of the middle and working classes provided subjects worthy of serious literary treatment. Dell valued authenticity and accuracy of detail and welcomed those like Russell and Phillips who wanted to use literature to bring about social reform.

While editor of the Friday Literary Review Dell also promoted the work of writers such as George Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell, Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Hillaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.

In 1914 Dell moved to New York and joined Max Eastman in helping edit the radical journal, The Masses. Dell wrote articles on several issues including support for Margaret Sanger and her birth control campaign. He also recruited promising writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Day and Carl Sandburg to write for the journal.

In 1916 Dell became involved in the Provincetown Theatre Group. Dell's King Arthur's Socks was the first play to be performed by the group. Others who wrote or acted for the group included Eugene O'Neill, George Gig Cook, Susan Glaspell, John Reed, Louise Bryant, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Dell, like most of the people working with The Masses, was opposed to USA involvement in the First World War. After the USA declared war on the Central Powers in 1917, The Masses came under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges.

In July, 1917, it was claimed by the authorities that articles by Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by Art Young, Boardman Robinson, and H. J. Glintenkamp had violated the Espionage Act. Under this act it was an offence to publish material that undermined the war effort. The legal action that followed forced The Masses to cease publication. In April, 1918, after three days of deliberation, the jury failed to agree on the guilt of Dell and his fellow defendants.

The second trial was held in January 1919. John Reed, who had recently returned from Russia, was also arrested and charged with the original defendants. This time eight of the twelve jurors voted for acquittal. As the war was now over, it was decided not to take them to court for a third time.

In 1918 the same people who produced The Masses, including Dell, Max Eastman, John Reed, Art Young, Robert Minor, and Boardman, Robinson went on the publish a very similar journal, The Liberator (1918-24).

After the war Dell published the best-selling autobiographical novel, Moon-Calf (1920). Other novels such as The Briary-Bush (1921), Janet Marsh (1923), and Runaway (1925), were less successful.

As well as writing for the left-wing magazines such as the New Masses (1924-39) Dell produced several non-fictional works including Upton Sinclair (1927), Love in the Machine Age (1930) and an autobiography, Homecoming (1933).

Dell edited the monthly New York journal, Arbitrator. Known along with Max Eastman as one of the nation’s prominent intellectual leftists and freethinking atheists, he was known in New York City’s Greenwich Village as a socialist, a Freudian, a radical, and a bohemian.

He once described The Masses as a publication that “stood for fun, truth, beauty, realism, freedom, peace, feminism, revolution.”