The Dial

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The January 1920 issue of the Dial.

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.

1 Transcendentalist journal
- 1.1 Online texts
2 Political magazine
3 Modernist literary magazine
- 3.1 The Dial Award
4 Dial Press
5 Notable contributors by volume

The Dial began as a transcendentalist magazine with Margaret Fuller as its first editor (1840–1842), succeeded by another founder, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In this first form, the magazine remained in publication until 1844. Emerson wrote to Fuller on August 4, 1840, of his ambitions for the magazine:

I begin to wish to see a different Dial from that which I first imagined. I would not have it too purely literary. I wish we might make a Journal so broad & great in its survey that it should lead the opinion of this generation on every great interest & read the law on property, government, education, as well as on art, letters, & religion. A great Journal people must read. And it does not seem worth our while to work with any other than sovereign aims. So I wish we might court some of the good fanatics and publish chapters on every head in the whole Art of Living....I know the danger of such latitude of plan in any but the best conducted Journal. It becomes friendly to special modes of reform, partisan, bigoted, perhaps whimsical; not universal & poetic. But our round table is not, I fancy, in imminent peril of party & bigotry, & we shall bruise each the other's whims by the collision. (in Emerson's Prose and Poetry, ed. Porte and Morris, p. 549)

The title of the journal, which was suggested by Bronson Alcott, intended to evoke a sundial. The connotations of the image were expanded upon by Emerson in concluding his editorial introduction to the journal's first issue:

And so with diligent hands and good intent we set down our Dial on the earth. We wish it may resemble that instrument in its celebrated happiness, that of measuring no hours but those of sunshine. Let it be one cheerful rational voice amidst the din of mourners and polemics. Or to abide by our chosen image, let it be such a Dial, not as the dead face of a clock, hardly even such as the Gnomon in a garden, but rather such a Dial as is the Garden itself, in whose leaves and flowers the suddenly awakened sleeper is instantly apprised not what part of dead time, but what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving. (in The Transcendentalists, ed. Miller, p. 251)

The Dial (Thoreau's Life & Writings at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods)

After a one-year revival in 1860, The Dial resumed publication in 1880 as a political magazine, and it was in this form that Margaret Anderson, soon to be founder of The Little Review, worked for the magazine. Francis Fisher Browne edited the publication for three decades.

In 1920, Scofield Thayer and Dr. James Sibley Watson. Jr. re-established The Dial as a literary magazine, the form for which it is was most successful and best known. Under and Watson's and Thayer's sway The Dial published remarkably 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, William Carlos Williams, 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.

The Dial published art as well as poetry and essays, with artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh, Renoir, Henri Matisse, and Odilon Redon, through Oskar Kokoschka, Constantin Brancusi, and Edvard Munch, and 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.

Watson was the steadfast foundation for "The Dial" as the magazine proceeded through a series of editors: Thayer from 1920–26, Gilbert Seldes (1922–23), Kenneth Burke (1923), Alyse Gregory (1923–25), Marianne Moore (1925–29). Thayer fell ill in 1927. The Dial ceased publication in July 1929.

In 1921, Thayer and Watson 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.

The magazine founded a book publisher, The Dial Press, in 1924. The publishing house survived, and, by the 1960s, Dial was jointly owned by Richard Baron and Dell Publishing; E. L. Doctorow was editor-in-chief. Best-selling authors included James Baldwin and Vance Bourjaily. When Doubleday acquired Dell, the children's division of Dial Press was sold to E. P. Dutton. Dutton was bought by New American Library, which in turn became a part of the Penguin Group, a division of Pearson PLC.