Dahlberg, Edward

Dahlberg, Edward

(1900–77) writer; born in Boston, Mass. Illegitimate son of a woman barber, he was sent to an orphanage in Cleveland, Ohio, as a boy, but he ran away. After studying at the University of California and Columbia University, he joined the expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s. He wrote pioneering proletarian novels in the 1930s (Bottom Dogs, 1929; From Flushing to Calvary, 1932), then faded from notice, reemerging in the 1960s as a prolific writer of bitter social and literary criticism, verse, and a highly regarded autobiography, Because I Was Flesh (1964). He taught at the University of Missouri: Kansas City (1964–77).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.