John E. Hart was professor English at Albion College (Albion, Michigan) from 1954 to 1982. Professor Hart, a graduate of Kansas Wesleyan University and Syracuse University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1954, was especially interested in American writers of the 1920s and 1930s. His published works include critical studies of authors Albert Halper and Floyd Dell, and he produced numerous scholarly articles.

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.

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 sex, love, 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.