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By R. CRAIG SAUTTER

Floyd Dell: Illinois writer



June 28, 1987 marks the centennial of Illinois-born novelist, critic, editor, poet, playwright, bohemian, feminist, reformer, Floyd Dell. But beyond a small community of scholars, librarians and second-hand booksellers, few readers from his home state even recognize the name of this flamboyant and articulate literary and social pioneer.

Yet Dell, author of 26 books and hundreds of editorials and reviews, wrote with a deeply intelligent and poetic midwestern voice, and was among the leading advocates of a literary and social modernism that was reshaping America before the first world war. For many he became the apostle of freedom, honesty and love, and of youth who strived to live this way. Indeed, Dell ranks among the most versatile and influential men of letters during the first third of the 20th century.

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Illinois-born Floyd Dell has been one of the state's better-kept secrets. The novelist, critic, editor, poet and playwright spent his first 26 years in the Midwest, taking with him when he left in 1913 a wealth of midwestern stories and memories of the region's ". . . grim yet generous hospitality to the fantastic beauty of young American life."
From the Floyd Dell Papers, The Newberry Library

Dell's midwestern experience was critical for formulating his social and aesthetic theories. "From Pike County [midway downstate along the Mississippi] the way to Chicago is by steam boat up to Quincy — a trip my family made when I was twelve," wrote Dell in his 1933 autobiography Homecoming, "then by steam boat again to Davenport, Iowa — where we went when I was sixteen; and then by rail across the corner of Illinois to Chicago — where I went when I was twenty-one. The trip can be made in a shorter time by one who knows where he is going; but I did not know."

What Dell did know from an early age was poverty. His grandfather had been an abolitionist farmer. But his father, a Civil War veteran and lifelong Republican, lost his butcher business and became permanently unemployed after the Panic of 1893. Dell seemed destined to follow his brothers into the factories, as indeed he first did after dropping out of high school to help support his parents.

Fortunately, public libraries in those small towns and cities along his journey offered him exciting and exotic escape from the material world that made him suffer. "It was the sign 'Free Public Library' which first attracted me," remembered Dell. The library was a sanctuary where "no one ordered him away or humiliated him by asking if he wanted to buy something." He secretly vowed to return. That promise transformed his life.

"At twelve I read Mark Twain's books,'' Dell recalled, ''and his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court gave me a permanent democratic contempt for medieval glories . . . and his 'Prince and Pauper' affected me deeply . . . ." Jules Verne's scientific fantasies led him to H.G. Wells and a "worship of the Future." By the time young Floyd read the "forbidden literature" of Diamond Dick and Nick Carter dime novels, he knew they could not compare as thrillers to Les Miserables or The Count of Monte Cristo.

In Quincy, his after-school hours were devoted to the library, "a grey stone building on the corner of the Square," where he was permitted by its "sympathetic guardians" to go behind the counter straight to the books. Only two others in town enjoyed such a privilege. He emptied its shelves of volumes by Ignatius Donnelly, Catherwood, Emerson, Carlyle and Kropotkin on the Russian nihilist movement.

Dell discovered his poetic soul at an early age. Not only was all his adolescent experience transformed into verse, but his reading shifted to poetry. "I was reading English and some other poetry at the rate of one great poet a week. I read and knew vastly by heart Wordsworth, Shelley, Walt Whitman, Kipling, Wilde, the Rossettis, Tennyson, Blunt, Herrick, Milton, Heine, Swinburne, Donne, Marvel, Drayton, Shakespeare's sonnets, some Persian and Chinese poetry . . . . Among living Americans I was enthusiastic about Bliss Carmen and (Chicagoan) William Vaughn Moody." The Rubaiyat mystified him with its seductive quatrains.

June 1987/Illinois Issues/21



Dell openly advocated feminism . . . promot[ing] women writers
like Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Jane Addams,
and his friend Susan Glaspell, who later won a Pulitzer Prize in drama


The young writer's poems were published in national magazines such as McClure's and Harpers, and he broke away from factory work by landing a job as a Davenport news reporter. After a few years' apprenticeship as local muckraker and drama critic, he completed his inevitable journey across the corner of Illinois. Dell described that moment on the last page of his first novel, Mooncalf, one of the nation's best sellers of 1920.

"He saw in his mind's eye, as he tramped the road, a picture of the map on the wall of the railway station — the map with a picture of iron roads from all over the midwest centering in a dark blotch in the corner . . . 'Chicago!' he said to himself ... his tramping steps went to the rhythm of a word that said itself over and over in his mind: 'Chicago! Chicago!' "

When Dell got off the train, he had 20 dollars in his pocket and a letter of introduction from a young Davenport librarian to a newspaper friend. Within six months, he had been appointed associate editor of The Friday Literary Review (FLR), a new supplement of the Chicago Evening Post. Almost instantly, The Friday Literary Review became the unofficial voice of what is now called the "Chicago Literary Renaissance." Chicago writers were rewriting the canons of American literature, provoking it from respectable romanticism to a more meaningful social realism, and Dell's extensive reading in those libraries along his intellectual voyage brilliantly prepared him for the task of critic for this new era. Dell noted that "doubtless the fact that I could 'review' briefly thirty to a hundred books a week, and still have time to read one book and criticize it, had something to do with my having this job."

Dell's reviews celebrated the bold modern works of writers like Chicago realists Theodore Dreiser, Henry Blake Fuller, Robert Herrick. He promoted obscure poets such as Ezra Pound, Swinburne, Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and his friends Vachel Lindsay and Arthur Davison Ficke. It was Dell who first collected Sandburg's poems for Poetry magazine, not his "Chicago poems," but earlier verse that was rejected but remembered by the editors.

Sherwood Anderson brought Dell early drafts of his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, and it came to print through Dell's efforts. He gave Fanny Butcher, future literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, and the beautiful and mystical Margaret Anderson reviews to write. And it was at one of those famous bohemian parties in Dell's studio on 57th Street and Stony Island in the old art colony that grew up among abandoned buildings from the Columbian Exposition, that Margaret Anderson announced her Little Review, which gained fame as the first to publish James Joyce's Ulysses. Scenes of this literary bohemianism were recreated in Dell's second novel, The Briary Bush, 1921.

In the summer of 1911, Dell became chief editor of FLR. His reviews of Jack London, David Graham Phillips, Frank Norris, Arnold Bennett, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Upton Sinclair, Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton, furthered his social and economic attack upon "the smug provincial minds in the seat of power of American publishing, respectable magazinedom and criticism, [who] had not the slightest notion of the revolution in public taste which was going to overthrow them in a few years." He enlisted George Cram Cook, a friend from Iowa, as associate editor. A few years later, Cook would found The Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village, home to America's greatest playwright, Eugene O'Neill.

Dell openly advocated feminism in his FLR's front page reviews. He promoted women writers like Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Jane Addams, and his friend Susan Glaspell, who later won a Pulitzer Prize in drama. His series on "modern women" introduced many readers to Emmeline Pankhurst, Beatrice Webb, Emma Goldman, Ellen Key, and debated topics of marriage and women's political and economic rights. His third novel, Janet March, 1923, further investigated these issues.

In the fall of 1913, Dell's pilgrimage led him east to Greenwich Village, where he continued his crusades as literary and managing editor of The Masses, and began a career as a novelist, building on short stories he had written in Chicago. He was just 26 years old. Lucian Cary, Dell's editorial replacement wrote, "Those who are familiar with the Friday Literary Review are aware of the intelligence and the enthusiasm which (Dell) brought to the consideration of contemporary literature and the unfailing courage and vivacity with which he exercised his literary gifts."

In years to come, the Middle West echoed in Dell's books, as in Mooncalf, with "tale[s] of that strange region.. .[and its] grim yet generous hospitality to the fantastic beauty of young American life."


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R. Craig Sautter is a poet and writer. He also teaches philosophy, politics, literature and creative writing at the School For New Learning, DePaul University. He is editing a volume of Dell's critical essays from the Friday literary Review and The Masses.

This essay is made possible in part through support of the Illinois Humanities Council.


Photo by Dennis Wiss


22/June 1987/Illinois Issues



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