Dial, The

a literary periodical founded in Chicago in 1880 by F. F. Browne. It was purchased by Scofield Thayer and J. S. Watson in 1919, following its move to New York in the previous year. Under Thayer's editorship it became the finest American magazine of literature and the arts of its day, publishing innovative work of the highest standard by leading American, British, and European writers. D. H. Lawrence regularly contributed short stories, which were also supplied by Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, and James Stephens; among the notable poets whose work appeared were T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land had its first American publication in the journal, W. B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore, who became the editor in 1925. The Dial was of particular importance in fostering advances in criticism; essays and reviews by Kenneth Burke, George Saintsbury, Yvor Winters, and other distinguished critics established new standards in textual analysis, anticipating the emergence of the New Criticism. Notable European contributors included Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorky, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Anatole France, and Paul Valéry. Henry McBride was the principal art critic, and reproductions of work by leading European painters and sculptors were frequently featured. The Dial ceased publication in 1929, Marianne Moore later recording that a general falling off in enthusiasm had reduced the tasks of editorship to ‘mere faithfulness to responsibility’.