Scofield Thayer, as owner of The Dial during the 1920s, was the center of the flow of cultural ideas between the United States and Europe, particularly those of the various modernist movements. He published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land for the first time in the United States and featured the works of writers whose works have gone on to become classics: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, and many others. The magazine's art reproductions introduced Americans to the artists of the period, such as Picasso, Matisse, Lachaise, and O’Keefe. Critics writing for the ma ... More

Scofield Thayer, as owner of The Dial during the 1920s, was the center of the flow of cultural ideas between the United States and Europe, particularly those of the various modernist movements. He published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land for the first time in the United States and featured the works of writers whose works have gone on to become classics: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, and many others. The magazine's art reproductions introduced Americans to the artists of the period, such as Picasso, Matisse, Lachaise, and O’Keefe. Critics writing for the magazine included Edmund Wilson and Van Wyck Brooks. The magazine was both a marketplace and a battleground of ideas, a place where aesthetics, not politics, was the chief concern. Compared to other avant-garde publications, the magazine's longevity ties to Thayer's careful selection of works as well as to his great wealth and that of his partner, James S. Watson, who poured money into the endeavor. Thayer was also an art collector, building up a collection of modernist works that is now at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. He suffered from mental instability and spent two years in analysis with Freud. In 1927 he had a complete mental breakdown that removed him from public life. He was eventually declared insane. This is the first biography of Thayer.