Floyd Dell (1887-1969) was a central figure in New York’s Greenwich Village scene from the 1910s.[1] Born in Illinois, and a keen reader from his early youth, he worked as a journalist in Davenport, Iowa, before moving to Chicago. In New York City his socialism, buoyed by friendships with various writers (e.g. Susan Glaspell), came to forefront of his work and life.[2] He became managing editor of socialist magazine, The Masses, working with fellow radicals John Reed and Louise Bryant, as popularised in the 1981 film, Reds.[3] The magazine was labelled ‘treasonable material’ in August, 1917, and its staff were charged with ‘obstructing the recruiting and enlistment of the United States’ military’, with Dell taken to trial that same year. The jury deliberated for three days, and came to no unanimous decision – all down to one accused ‘socialist’ juror, whom the others attempted to lynch in anger when the guilty verdict could not be counted. Dell could not be convicted but the magazine did not survive the year. Subsequently, he joined The Liberator between 1918 and 1924 and began to write novels, including the best-selling Moon-Calf (1920).[4] He worked with the Federal Writers Project until 1947.[6]
Dell was involved with the political Left throughout his life. He joined the Socialist Party at the age of sixteen and used to give speeches on his political beliefs on street corners, writing for Tri-City Workers’ Magazine, a socialist publication. He argued in Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism (1913) that feminism would make the freedom of all men possible. While working for The Masses, he supported Margaret Sanger’s birth control campaign, and later worked with other magazines, including the New Masses (1924-39). Despite being little known now, he and his writings defined the WW1-era Left generation in New York and the US.
His Leftism, on occasion, was refracted through the prism of classical antiquity. In a 1914 publication with The Masses, entitled Homer and the Soapbox, he called Thersites, the failed revolutionary in Homer’s Iliad, Book 2, ‘the first antimilitarist agitator whose name has come down to us’.[7] In many ways, he turns Thersites into the first conscientious objector.[8]
This profile was written by Anna Coopey
[1] For more on Greenwich Village, see Strausbaugh, John (2014): The Village: 400 Years of Bears and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues – A History of Greenwich Village (Ecco).
[2] For more on Susan Glaspell, see Ozieblo, Barbara (2000): Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (University of North Carolina Press).
[3] For more on The Masses magazine, see Fishbein, Leslie (1982): Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911-1917 (University of North Carolina Press).
For more on John Reed and Louise Bryant, see respectively: Rosenstone, Robert A (1990): Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (Harvard University Press), and Dearborn, Mary V (1996): Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant (Houghton Mifflin Company).
[4] Dell, Floyd (1920): Moon-Calf, A Novel (Ulan Press).
[5] Dell, Floyd (1933): Homecoming (Farrar & Rinehart Incorporated).
[6] For more on the Federal Writers’ Project, see Mangione, Jerre (1972): The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-1943 (Little, Brown).
[7] Homer and The Soapbox from The Masses (Page 11) (1 Jan. 1914).
[8] For further treatment of Thersites as a revolutionary figure, see Coopey (2021) Thersites: Anti-War Agitator.
