Floyd Dell in Iowa

Abstract

From 1910 until 1920 Floyd Dell was a major force in American literature, becoming a bellwether of literary experimentation. In Chicago he helped to fashion a midwestern resurgence of writing; later, in New York, he was at the center of the Provincetown Players who discovered Eugene O’Neill and invented modern American drama. Unfortunately for Dell, his fate for half a century has been to languish and be forgotten. Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur. His friends died young, thereby insuring their fame: John Reed died during the Russian Revolution, George Cook reached his apotheosis on the edge of Mount Olympus in Greece, and Randolph Bourne perished of disease. Dell died in 1969, virtually forgotten, meriting but a few seconds in Warren Beatty’s recent movie production of Reds (1981). Dell’s family exerted the strongest influence on his writing. He was born in Barry, Illinois, in 1887, the youngest son in a family of three brothers and a sister. His father, Anthony Dell, was an impecunious butcher who moved his family to the old river town of Quincy. It was there that Dell first felt the shame of being poor: as the family’s fortunes plummeted, the bric-a-brac table in the kitchen containing mementoes of earlier times became for him a symbol of lost respectability.1 In 1903 the family moved again, this time upriver to Davenport, Iowa. His mother, Kate Crone Dell, had been a country schoolteacher, and she encouraged her son to write. His father was a Civil War veteran whose tenuous connection to the Republican party helped his son get a newspaper job and protected the son after Dell had publicly joined the local Socialist party. Although Dell left Iowa in 1908, he returned to Davenport on numerous occasions. The death of his parents in the early 1920s seemed to shatter his career and he left for Europe in 1925 in order to write his