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Floyd Dell's life and work consisted of a series of intense contradictions. Born in Pike County, Illinois, of Pennsylvania-Dutch and Irish stock, raised to value respectability and Republicanism, Dell became a poet, novelist, and editor of left-wing periodicals in New York's haven for wayward Bohemians, Greenwich Village. In his autobiography, Homecoming, he displays an ambivalence toward his past, vacillating between rebellion and conformity; this accounts for his eclecticism in evolving a philosophy of life. Dell alternately and, more often, simultaneously defined himself as a modernist, as a Marxist, and as an enthusiastic Freudian. It was in these terms that he could view himself as a poet-revolutionary without having to choose either role to the exclusion of the other.
Modernism was an appealing doctrine because of its experimental nature. Seeing doubt as a healthy process and preaching minute examination of the dynamics of the self, it affirmed the value of Dell's preoccupation with his psychic growth.5a It justified writing an autobiography only peripherally concerned with Dell's conversion to and education in socialism, a book filled with romantic speculations about love and art. Dell followed the modernist pattern of being highly conscious but critical of the contemporary scene; he hoped to use his art, his sensuous poetry and pointed satire, to undermine the pervasive, stultifying bourgeois morality and thus to reconnect his audience with the full richness of the inner life.7, 8 In a sense, Dell may be seen as attempting to cure the alienation of the worker, whom Karl Marx had described as the “tool of his tools.” He hoped to release love, faith, and the appreciation of beauty to soften the asperities of life in the Machine Age.