The Dial  

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The Dial was an American magazine published intermittently from 1840 to 1929. In its first form, from 1840 to 1844, it served as the chief publication of the Transcendentalists. In the 1880s it was revived as a political magazine. From 1920 to 1929 it was an influential outlet for Modernist literature in English.

Modernist literary magazine

Finally, in 1920, Scofield Thayer re-established The Dial as a literary magazine, the form for which it is was most successful and best known. Under Thayer's sway The Dial published remarkable harvests of influential artwork, poetry and fiction, including William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming and the first U.S. publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The first year alone saw the appearance of Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Charles Demuth, Kahlil Gibran, Gaston Lachaise, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Odilon Redon, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sandburg, Van Wyck Brooks, and W. B. Yeats.

In this literary phase, The Dial published art as well as poetry and essays, with artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh, Renoir, Henri Matisse, and Odilon Redon on the one hand, through Oskar Kokoschka, Constantin Brancusi, and Edvard Munch, and even to Georgia O'Keeffe and Joseph Stella. The magazine also reported on the cultural life of European capitals, writers included T. S. Eliot from London, John Eglinton from Dublin, Ezra Pound from Paris, Thomas Mann from Germany, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal from Vienna.

The Dial proceeded through a series of editors in these years: Thayer overall from 1920–26, Gilbert Seldes (1922–23), Kenneth Burke (1923), Alyse Gregory (1923–25), Marianne Moore (1925–29). Thayer fell ill in 1927, and without his financial support, the magazine fell into financial distress. The Dial ceased publication in July 1929.

The Dial Award

In 1921, Thayer announced the creation of the Dial Award, $2000 to be presented to one of its contributors, acknowledging their "service to letters" in hopes of providing the artist with "leisure through which at least one artist may serve God (or go to the Devil) according to his own lights. Eight awards were granted.

Notable contributors by volume

In its literary phase, The Dial was published monthly. Notable contributors for each of its volumes (six-month intervals) are summarized below.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Dial" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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