Floyd Dell, novelist, book reviewer, editor, playwright, and cultural historian, was already a well-known editor and recognized literary personality before the 1920 publication of Moon-Calf , his first and best novel. His story of a sensitive young man who rebelled against small-town respectability to seek success in the city caught the restless spirit of youth everywhere. Dell's rebellion against middle-class conventions, his incisive mind and graceful style, his capacity for work made him a unique and enduring influence on literary and social thinking during the first third of the twentieth century. Homecoming: An Autobiography (1933) and Intellectual Vagabondage (1926), his evaluations of his own literary generation of writers and artists, attest the breadth of his learning and the depth of his perception.

Dell was born 28 June 1887 in Barry, Illinois, the late arrival in a family of two older brothers and an older sister. Long before his birth, his father's butcher business had...