The Dial magazine final issue
The final issue of *The Dial* magazine marks the end of a significant chapter in American literary history. Originally established in the 1840s as a platform for the Transcendentalist movement, *The Dial* evolved into a key contributor to modernist literature and art in the 1920s under the direction of new owners Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson Jr. The magazine became renowned for featuring works by prominent writers such as E. E. Cummings, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot, as well as artworks by celebrated artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Pablo Picasso. During its peak, *The Dial* not only published influential essays, poetry, and fiction, but it also introduced the Dial Award, recognizing outstanding literary contributions. Despite its initial success, the publication faced financial instability, leading to its final issue in 1929. The legacy of *The Dial* lies in its crucial role in promoting modernism and expanding its audience, making it one of the most important literary magazines of its time.
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Subject Terms
The Dial magazine final issue
Identification: American literary magazine
Editors/publishers: Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson Jr.
Date: 1840 to 1929
The Dial was established in the 1840s as the primary literary outlet for the Transcendentalist movement centered in New England. Under new ownership in the 1920s, The Dial became a significant vehicle for disseminating modernist literature and art, including essays, poetry, and fiction, along with prints and photographs.
In the early 1840s, The Dial published essays by such leading Transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Although the original publication ended in 1844, it was recreated in Chicago in the late nineteenth century as a literary and political magazine. After the publication became financially unstable in the late 1910s, it was taken over in 1920 by a pair of Harvard literati from wealthy New England families: Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson Jr.
Together, Thayer and Watson revitalized The Dial in New York City as a monthly literary journal with an editorial focus on modernist writers and artists, publishing fiction, poetry, and essays by some of the foremost writers of the day, including Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings, John Dewey, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and William Butler Yeats, among others. Artists whose works appeared in The Dial included Marc Chagall, Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Pablo Picasso.
Thayer and Watson also established the Dial Award, an annual literary prize of two thousand dollars. By awarding the second prize to T. S. Eliot in 1922 for his poem “The Waste Land,” whose first U.S. publication was in the pages of The Dial, the journal settled a dispute with Eliot over his payment for the landmark work. Other recipients of the Dial Award, of which eight were granted, included Anderson, Cummings, and William Carlos Williams.
Thayer suffered a nervous breakdown in 1925 and resigned from the magazine the following year. As Watson increasingly dabbled in avant-garde film production, control of the publication passed to poet Marianne Moore, herself the 1924 Dial Award recipient. Its heyday behind it, the magazine eventually ceased publication for the last time in 1929.
Impact
The Dial was one of the most important literary magazines of the 1920s. Though it experienced a number of changes in content and editorial focus during its existence, thejournal became internationally renowned for publishing some of the most notable American and European modernist writers and artists of the period, thus helping expand the audience for modernism, the signature twentieth-century movement in arts and letters.
Bibliography
Joost, Nicholas. Scofield Thayer and“The Dial”: An Illustrated History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964.
Rainey, Lawrence S. Modernism: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2010.
Wasserstrom, William. The Time of “The Dial.” Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1980.