Floyd Dell (1887-1969) was one of the central figures of the Chicago literary renaissance and Greenwich Village bohemianism of the early twentieth century. He was a pivotal American writer whose advocacy of feminism, socialism, psychoanalysis, and progressive education shocked the American bourgeoisie. His novels, plays, essays, and bohemian life came to epitomize the Greenwich Village avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s. Managing editor of radical magazine The Masses, Dell was twice put on trial for publishing subversive literature. Dell has been called "one of the most flamboyant, versatile and influential American men of letters of the first third of the Twentieth Century."