Floyd Dell

Floyd Dell (born June 28, 1887 in Barry , Pike County , Illinois , † July 23, 1969 in Bethesda , Maryland ) was an American writer and journalist . His socially critical realism did not stop at the disadvantage of women and sexual taboos. In the 1920s he was one of the most influential minds of the Greenwich Village of New York settled left scene.

life and work

Floyd Dell grew up in the small town of Barry as the son of a butcher stricken by the economic crisis and a teacher in poverty. Encouraged by his mother, he warmed himself to books as a student, including books by William Morris , Jack London, and Frank Norris . He spent more time in the city library than at home. Barely 16 years old, he joined the Socialist Party and wrote articles. In 1903, the parents moved to Davenport , Iowa , which then had a population of just under 40,000. He dropped out of high school and enjoyed playing rebel and bohemian roles with close friends George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell (who later married) . The tall, slim man with long sideburns has always had the urge to reconcile extremes, writes Bill Knight, for example, self-reflection in seclusion with public activity, personal matters with politics, precaution with carefree. A friend Eastman will later attest to him: "I have never known a more sensible or reliable person, more diverse and intelligent and flexible in the coordination of social and economic interests, and I never knew a writer who had his talents more fully under control."

Journalist and bohemian

After an apprenticeship in a candy factory, Dell became a reporter and journalist. In 1908 he made the leap to the Chicago Evening Post . The new editor promoted authors such as Theodore Dreiser , Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg . As a critic, Dell was "fearless and fair," it said in 1923 in Time Magazine . In 1911 he was brought in by Francis Hackett as editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Friday Literary Review , which was also published in Chicago , but two years later Dell moved to New York, where he quickly became one of the leading figures in Greenwich Village. Here he edited, together with leftists such as Max Eastman , John Reed , Art Young and Robert Minor , the magazine The Masses from 1914 to 1917 and the magazine The Liberator from 1918 to 1924 . He also belonged to the group of Provincetown Players , who brought socially critical plays to the stage, for example by Eugene O'Neill , also by Dell himself. During this time he went - after a love affair with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay - his second marriage a (1919 with Berta Marie Gage) that would hold for the rest of his life. At 22, he had married Margery Currey, twelve years his senior. Regardless of these formalities, Dell wrote for women's liberation and birth control - and against US intervention in the First World War . A related charge against him and a number of prominent colleagues was put down in 1919.

Novelist and social worker

Dell had his “breakthrough” as a novelist in 1920 with The Moon-Calf . The story of the young, sensitive Felix Fay, who rebels against provincial narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, is often referred to as the “ Catcher In The Rye of the Roaring Twenties ” - it became a “cult book”, as one would say today. Several less successful novels followed. In the 1930s, Dell's popularity waned; there were also diseases. However, his beliefs remained. "Dell believes in the America of Emerson , Thoreau and Whitman , in the socialism of Shaws and John Ruskins , in the reform movement, the Socialist Party and the New Deal." With his autobiography Homecoming (1933) Dell gives up writing. From 1935 he was employed for the rest of his working life with the State Works Progress Administration (WPA), the New Deal employment agency in Washington, DC , in addition also speechwriter for union leaders. In retirement (from 1947) he occasionally wrote articles or granted an interview that perpetuated the legend of his “lost youth”. William H. Roba quotes from Homecoming Dell's verses:

'Neath shifting sands of twice ten thousand years,
It lies, the lost Atlantis of my youth;
And this I have to show my sister spheres
A dead dream, and these lingering tribes uncouth.

When Dell (1969) died at the age of 82, he was all but forgotten. 35 years later, Linda Ben-Zvi writes:

“Today Floyd Dell is considered by critics to be a minor writer and is virtually unknown to the general reading public; but during the first decades of the century, it was impossible to read national newspapers, literary magazines, or book reviews without coming across his name. If anyone could be said to be the early chronicler of modernism in America and of the great migration of writers and artists from the Midwest to Greenwich Village, it was Floyd Dell. "

Works

• Were You Ever a Child? , Nonfiction, 1919, German Have you ever been a child? , Leipzig 1924
• Moon-Calf , novel, 1920 (often referred to as Dell's only best seller )
• The Briary-Bush , novel, 1921
• King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays , New York 1922
• Janet March , Roman, 1923 (feminist perspective; partly boycotted in bookstores at the time)
• Runaway , Roman, 1925, also Leipzig 1926
• This mad ideal , Roman, Leipzig 1925
• Love in Greenwich Village , novel, 1926
• An Unmarried Father , Roman, 1927 (German His father, the bachelor , Berlin 1928)
• Upton Sinclair : A Study in Social Protest , essay, 1927
• Little Accident , Comedy, 1929, German joyful event , Berlin 1929 (allegedly a Brodway hit, also made into a film)
• Love in the machine age: a psychological study of the transition from patriarchal society , London 1930
• Homecoming , autobiography, 1933

literature

• John E. Hart: Floyd Dell , New York 1971
• Judith Nierman: Floyd Dell: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Sources, 1910-1981 , Scarecrow Press, 1984
• Douglas Clayton: Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel , Chicago 1994

Individual evidence

1. ↑ WIU 1 ( Memento of the original from September 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed May 22, 2011  
2. ↑ ^{a b c} WIU 2  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed May 22, 2011  
3. ^ Time May 28, 1923 , accessed May 22, 2011
4. ^ Roba 1986 , accessed May 22, 2011
5. ↑ Susan Glaspell , 2005, quoted from Spartacus , accessed May 22, 2011
6. ↑ Translation: “Today, critics regard Dell as an insignificant writer and he is almost unknown to the general reading public. However, during the first decades of his century it was impossible to read national newspapers and literary magazines without encountering his name. If one can be said of some, he was the early chronicler of modernism in America and the migration of writers and artists of the Midwest to Greenwich Village, then by Floyd Dell. "
7. ↑ Here online , accessed on May 22, 2011
8. ↑ Some passages (English) on Spartacus , accessed on May 22, 2011

Web links

• Literature by and about Floyd Dell in the catalog of the German National Library
• "Love and Companionship Came First": Floyd Dell on Modern Marriage
• Floyd Dell in nndb (English)