Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977) was a novelist, essayist, and critic. Born in Boston to an itinerant mother, and later raised in an orphanage, Dahlberg graduated from the Jewish Orphan's Asylum High School in Cleveland, Ohio, before enlisting in the US Army in 1917. In the 1920s, he joined other American expats in Paris, and in 1929 published his first novel, Bottom Dogs (1929), with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence. This was followed by over a dozen books of fiction, essays, memoir, and poetry. Dahlberg's career, which began in a proletarian style common in the politically charged 1930s, turned controversial when he changed his political commitments as well as his ideas about contemporary literature. Dahlberg was called "one of the shrewdest, most rugged and interesting 'failures' in American letters" in the New York Review of Books and a "curmudgeon of American letters" in the New York Times-leading Hilton Kramer, writing after Dahlberg's return to literary prominence toward the end of his life, to call him "the literary phoenix of his generation.

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