Delysle Ferree Cass was a magazine writer from the early twentieth century, publishing fantasy short stories as well as non-fiction for trade journals. 

He was born and raised in Chicago, and he went from there to Amherst College, graduating in 1912.  He eventually returned to Chicago, where he married Norma Dorgan, who was the child of Irish immigrants.

He seemed to earn enough from his writing to support his family, at least some of the time. Already by 1913, according to the Chicago Press Club, he was "an author of good strong stories, at good and rising rates per word," selling stories to "big" magazines -- magazines that also published authors still read today, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Among his publications were "Pilgrims in Love," in All-Story Magazine (1913); “The Man Who Could Not Die,” in All-Story Magazine (1914); and “How to Write and Sell a Short Story,” in the Chicago Tribune (1916).   In 1922, he listed his occupation as "salesman" working for Fairchild Publications, having apparently taken a day job selling subscriptions or advertising to such magazines as Women's Wear Daily. 

Many readers find Cass's fiction disturbing. His "Pilgrims in Love" attracted the attention of H.P. Lovecraft, who objected to its "vulgarity" in focusing on "Oriental love"; Lovecraft described the story as "contemptibly disgusting, unspeakably nauseating."

Twenty-first-century readers might also find disturbing Cass's attitude toward women.  For example, "Pilgrims in Love" opens with an enslaved girl standing naked on an auction block while men inspect and haggle over her. And in "How to Write and Sell a Short Story," Cass explains one of his writing strategies was to seek out "girls in all walks of life" whom he could make uncomfortable.  He explained that he would "in cold blood conjecture how that girl ought to act under the stress of one or another sensual stimulant"; and then, after the encounter was over, he carefully recorded their reactions for use in his fiction -- "the sensual throb of the throat, the nervous interlacing of fingers, the inadvertent catch of the breath."

He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, according to Is Your Neighbor a Kluxer, a pamphlet which listed the paid members of the Klan in Chicago as of 1922.

Sources:

• 1920 United States Census. Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, digital image s.v. “De Lyste Ferre Cass,” Ancestry.com. 
• “Announcement is Made.” Chicago Tribune, June 25, 1916, 4.
• Cass, DeLysle Ferree. “Pilgrims in Love.”   All-Story Magazine, Sept. and Oct. 1913.
• Cass, DeLysle Ferree.“The Man Who Could Not Die.”  All-Story Magazine, 1914.
• Cass, DeLysle Ferree. “How to Write and Sell a Short Story.” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 7, 1916, 15.
• "Fairchild Publications Booth Is of Interest to Many Visitors." Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, Sept. 27, 1925, 37.
• H.P.L, [H.P. Lovecraft]. "Letters to the Editor." All-Story Magazine, March 7, 1914 (transcribed by Darrell C. Richardson, in Fantasy Commentator, Spring 1948, pp. 203, 216-18).
• Is Your Neighbor A Kluxer? A Complete Exposure of the Chicago Ku Klux Klan (American Unity League, 1923), 17 (edited excerpt available from Hanover College).
• “Novelist, Short Story, and Trade Journal Writer, De Lysle Ferree Cass, Amherst, ‘12.” The Scroll of Phi Delta Theta, 38 (no. 3), Jan. 1914, 334-335.
• “Personal.” The Scroll of Phi Delta Theta, 41 (no. 1), November 1916, 54.