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 support his family with his writing, at least some of the time. Already by 1913, according to the Chicago Press Club, he was he was "an author of good strong stories, at good and rising rates per word," selling stories to "big" eastern magazines. Among his publications were “The Man Who Could Not Die,” in All-Story Magazine (1914); "Pilgrims in Love," in All-Story Magazine (1914); and “How to Write and Sell a Short Story,” in the Chicago Tribune (1916).
Many readers find his 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 a slave 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:
“Pilgrims in Love,” All-Story Magazine, Sept. and Oct. 1913.
“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.
“The Man Who Could Not Die,” All-Story Magazine, 1914.
H.P.L, “"Letters to the Editor," All-Story Magazine, March 7, 1914.
“How to Write and Sell a Short Story,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 7, 1916, 15.
“Announcement is Made,” Chicago Tribune, June 25, 1916, 4.
“Personal,” The Scroll of Phi Delta Theta, 41 (no. 1), November 1916, 54.
1920 United States Census, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, digital image s.v. “De Lyste Ferre Cass,” Ancestry.com.
Is Your Neighbor A Kluxer? A Complete Exposure of the Chicago Ku Klux Klan (Chicago: American Unity League, 1923), 17.