American poet, novelist, playwright, newspaperman, literary editor, and author of books and articles on politics, education, social mores and, in his later career, writer for the Works Progress Administration.

Born in 1887, Floyd Dell began his literary career as a newspaperman, first in Iowa as a reporter for the Davenport Daily Times and then in Chicago on various papers. In 1911 he became editor of and chief contributor to the Friday Literary Review, a supplement of the Chicago Evening Post, which became one of the best-known literary supplements in the country, and which led to friendships with Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Deciding to turn his talents to writing fiction, in 1914 Dell left Chicago for New York -- the goal of most young Middle Western writers at the time -- and settled into the Bohemian literary and artistic world of Greenwich Village. Here he became closely associated with such noted literary figures as Theodore Dreiser, Max Eastman and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and developed friendships with radical John Reed and writer Joseph Freeman.

In 1914 Dell became an editor of the publication Masses and subsequently of its successors the Liberator and the New Masses, for he had been a Socialist since boyhood. Dell's first marriage to Margery Currey ended in divorce in 1915, and in 1919 he married Berta-Marie Gage with whom he had two sons, Anthony and Christopher. In 1919, they moved to Croton-on-Hudson, where Dell finished his first novel, the autobiographical Moon-Calf, following it with a second, The Briary-Bush. Through the 1920s Dell continued to write novels, poetry, a study of Upton Sinclair and a number of books and articles based on the themes of sex, love, marriage, feminism, psychoanalysis and education of children. However, by the 1930s these themes, his interests in them, and his literary style seemed quaint and out of tune with the times, and increasingly Dell was no longer a force in American letters nor a participant in radical circles.

In 1935, his work having ceased selling, Dell accepted a job with the WPA, as an editor and ghostwriter. He retired from the WPA in 1947, and until his death in 1969 this "romantic rebel" concentrated his writing on copious correspondence.