And independent researcher and scholar, Miriam Gurko wrote biographies and histories, primarily for a juvenile audience. Among her works are: The Lives and Times of Peter Cooper (1959), Restless Spirit: A Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1962), Clarence Darrow (1965), Indian America: the Black Hawk War (1970), The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement (1974). During her research for the biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gurko met and became friends with Dell, with whom she corresponded until 1968. In the years after Dell's death in 1969, Gurko transcribed many of his letters to her in preparation for publishing them under the title Letters of Floyd Dell About Edna St. Vincent Millay. Gurko died in 1988.

Floyd Dell, American poet, novelist, playwright, newspaperman and literary editor, was born in Iowa in 1887. Dell found success in Chicago as the editor of and chief contributor to the well-known Friday Literary Review, before moving to New York where he settled into the Bohemian literary and artistic world of Greenwich Village. It was here he developed a close relationship with the young poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

In 1914 Dell, an avowed Socialist, became editor of Masses and later the Liberator and the New Masses. In 1919, he published his first novel, Moon-Calf, and then continued to write fiction and poetry, plus a critical work on Upton Sinclair and a number of books and articles based on themes of love, sex, marriage, psychoanalysis, education and other topics which interested him.

By 1935 his work had ceased selling, and Dell accepted a job with the WPA as editor and ghostwriter. In his later years, this "romantic rebel" maintained a copious correspondence until his death in 1969.