cover image Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel

Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel

Douglas Clayton. Ivan R. Dee Publisher, $30 (352pp) ISBN 978-1-56663-059-7

A political radical, Dell (1887-1969) became a committed socialist after observing the disastrous effects of poverty on his family during his Midwestern childhood. His rise to prominence as a novelist (Moon-Calf) and a journalist who wrote and edited for The Masses is detailed in this lively study by a humanities editor at the University of Nebraska Press. Clayton vividly evokes the bohemia of Greenwich Village during the early 1900s, where Dell socialized with journalists John Reed and Max Eastman, and novelists Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Sherwood Anderson. There Dell conducted several love affairs, including a tempestuous relationship with poet Edna St. Vincent Millay after his first marriage failed. His second marriage brought Dell a stable family life, and employment by the Federal Writer's Project during the 1930s gave him financial security. Of particular interest are the excerpts included here from Dell's strained correspondence with Max Eastman during the 1950s, when Eastman became a McCarthyite. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)