Let us skip the realism of the later nineteenth century, most of which is essentially arid, and approach such a figure as Floyd Dell. Born of autobiographical revery, _Moon-Calf_ is the history of a “lonely, unhappy, desperately desiring and bewildered child” in various Middle Western towns as he sought refuge in dreams from “the mysterious and troublesome real world which he feared and disliked.” The avenues of escape are two: the “gorgeous fantasies which were unrolled for him in the pages of books,” and the quest of the dream-girl. Lured by the hope of “freedom, of happiness, of a world altogether new and beautiful,” Felix becomes a Socialist, only to find later that “that garret Utopia had somehow lost its savour.” He becomes a factory worker--in the chaste language of his boss, “the messiest, absent-mindedest, God-damn carelessest person he had ever seen around a factory.” And then he tries newspaper work, and is again discharged. Then “he wanted, with a kind of nostalgia, to write that novel.” Like Shelley, he sought refuge from a world to which he refused to adjust himself by turning “his gaze inward upon a world of ideas and dreams.” As Wheels says, “The world itself is hideous. You can’t do anything with it. But you can dream beautiful dreams.... There is no other beauty.” An “incorrigible Utopian,” a member of the Agnostic Society, Felix escaped to poetry--an “enchanted land”--loving the “drug-like beauty” of “words, which were like a perfumed breeze out of nowhere, or out of some strange life lived before, affecting him with a strange nostalgia.” “Nay, I was sent a wanderer On Beauty’s desperate quest-- To go forever seeking Her, Nor, ere I find her, rest.”