Floyd Dell An Author Who Dared to Tell the Truth

Floyd Dell

Floyd Dell was born in Barry, Illinois, in 1887 and grew up across the river in Davenport, Iowa—a good town for hardware, a bad one for dreamers. He quit school at sixteen, took a job in a bookstore, and decided reading was as close to freedom as he could get. “I wanted to know everything immediately,” he said, “without waiting for it to happen to me.”

By twenty, he was reviewing books for the Davenport Times and running with a small gang of misfits—Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, Arthur Davison Ficke—the Davenport Group. They met in parlors, drank weak coffee, and talked about socialism, sex, and art in a state that preferred silence. “We were,” Dell said, “the only people in Iowa who thought talk was a form of action.”

He drifted to Chicago, where the air smelled like ambition and slaughterhouses. He joined The Masses, a radical magazine that mixed cartoons with revolution and prose with profanity. Dell’s essays hit like manifestos in disguise. “The artist,” he wrote, “is the only man who dares tell the truth.” He believed literature had a moral duty—to shake the country awake. “We want a literature,” he said, “that comes out of life, not out of libraries. It should have dirt under its fingernails.”

When The Masses was shut down for its antiwar views in 1917, Dell and his fellow editors were hauled into court for sedition. He stood before the jury and said, “If I’m guilty of anything, it’s believing the world can still be improved by telling the truth.” The jury acquitted him, but just barely. The New York Evening Sun called him “dangerously articulate,” which delighted him. “That’s all any writer ever wanted to be,” he told a friend.

He headed for Greenwich Village, where coffeehouses were crowded with poets, anarchists, and people pretending to be both. A reporter said Dell looked like “a choirboy who’d read Nietzsche.” He fit right in. He wrote about love, women, and art with the same reckless sincerity that got him into court. “Love,” he said, “is the world’s first and last revolution.” In another essay, he warned that “morality, when enforced, becomes a crime against joy.”

In 1920, he poured his ideals and memories into Moon-Calf, the story of a Midwestern boy trying to escape boredom and find honesty in a dishonest world. “The world is not wicked,” his character says. “It is only asleep.” Critics didn’t know what to do with it. H. L. Mencken called it “a book that smells of sweat and sincerity.” Others called it egotistical. Dell shrugged. “The ego,” he said, “is all we’ve got until justice arrives.”

He followed it with The Briary Bush, another confession disguised as fiction. It didn’t sell much, but it told the truth about what comes after idealism—the dull ache of disappointment. “We thought we could live as beautifully as we talked,” he wrote, “and paid for it in rent and heartbreak.” The line could’ve been his epitaph.

A 1925 review in The Tribune called him a “dangerous and destructive fellow,” but tempered that saying, there are “others who are grateful to him for his refreshing and poetic understanding of the dreams of youth.”

Dell landed in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s working for the Federal Writers’ Project, helping young writers survive the Depression. “Never confuse despair with depth,” he told them. His memoir Homecoming (1933) looked back on his Village years without apology. “We were young and certain,” he wrote, “and that was our tragedy and our triumph.”

When the Beats and the counterculture came along decades later, he just grinned. “They’re playing our old music,” he said. “Only louder.” He’d already said everything they were shouting—about freedom, art, love, and the right to live honestly.

Floyd Dell died in 1969, the same year Woodstock made sincerity fashionable again. He never became a household name, but his fingerprints are all over modern American writing—the belief that truth, love, and rebellion come from the same dangerous place.

He once wrote, “The world may never be saved, but it can be made interesting.” And that’s what he did—made it interesting, made it human, and never once asked permission.