Moon‐Calf, a semi‐autobiographical novel by Floyd Dell, was published in 1920. The sequel is called, The Briary Bush.Felix Fay, the son of a poor family in a small Illinois town, hates the mean everyday world that surrounds him, and moons through life “in the day‐dreams which books unfold before him.” His adolescent education includes toying with atheism and socialism, the writing of romantic poetry, and being admired by older women with literary inclinations. He becomes a newspaper reporter and has an affair with a girl, Joyce, whom he considers to be a person with beliefs and standards like his own, until he loses his job and, going away to write a novel, leaves her free to marry a man who represents the philistine world he hates. Still a sensitive, idealistic youth frustrated by his surroundings, he goes to Chicago, hoping to find a world closer to his dreams.*Floyd Dell was among the most mature talents in the group of younger writers active in Greenwich Village in the period just before and after the first World War. A student of Freud, he was the first writer of stature to employ the methods of psychoanalysis in the writing of fiction. Floyd Dell was a political radical in his early years in New York, where he served as editor on The Masses and The Liberator, but he never submitted to any intellectual yoke nor participated in any "school." He has on that account often found himself out of step with his literary contemporaries not a proletarian, nor a "true" Freudian, indeed he was often assailed by one group or another as a deserter. But he has steadily retained his independence as a thinker and writer and has never compromised with fashion or with commerce......* summary from Encyclopedia.com