Search Results

This chapter examines the life and career of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1838 to 1840. After her resignation at the Greene Street School, Fuller returned home to Massachusetts, sold the Groton farm and moved to Jamaica Plains. During this period, Fuller started meeting with local women to discuss women's rights and the role and purpose of women in life and society. In 1940, he accepted Ralph Waldo Emerson's offer to become editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial.

This chapter analyses the ‘Ford Motor Correspondence’ along with the characterization of the poet Marianne Moore. It asks whether the poet is as remote from the modern world as the letters indicate, or if she is the savvy performer of a Chaplinesque dance through the cog wheels of midcentury consumerism. In bringing out certain continuities between modernist Moore — sometime contributor to and editor of The Dial — and ‘preposterous’ Moore — one time naming consultant at Ford marketing, the chapter offers a close up on the complex relations between modernist poetry, the commercial sphere, and periodical culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This analysis brings the Ford letters into correspondence with the elements of style that are everywhere felt, yet nowhere seen, in The New Yorker, and which serve as the magazine's most enduring self promotional device.

The most famous intellectual in America at the time of the Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson had started out confused and rebellious. Like his father he became a minister, but he resigned his pulpit in 1832 feeling that Unitarianism did not respond to the stirrings of the heart. In the next decade, he developed his ideas on the place of the individual in society. In Nature, he encouraged readers to break free from the stranglehold of the past, from empirical science, and from artificial social arrangements, all of which had combined to fracture and blind mankind. He called for intuition and spontaneity. By the time he was done, he had followers. Some were also young New England men and women who gathered together, became known as Transcendentalists, and published a paper called The Dial.

The Dial moved from Chicago to New York in 1918 and got into financial trouble. Thayer, having loaned the magazine a good deal of money, became the owner along with James Sibley Watson, a Harvard friend. E. E. Cummings had also moved to New York, where he began an affair with Elaine Orr. She bore him a daughter, Nancy. Thayer, meanwhile, began a relationship with Alyse Gregory. Thayer and Watson decided to forgo politics in their magazine and to devote The Dial to art, literature, and criticism.

Chapter 1 introduces us to Scofield Thayer in the following anecdote. In 1924, a nationally know portrait artist visited Worcester, Massachusetts, to paint the portrait of a college president. Interviewed by the local newspaper, he called Thayer's The Dial “an intellectual sewer,” not realizing that Worcester is Thayer's hometown. Thayer responded in a Dial article that describes the very different views of art that existed between the traditionalists and the avant-garde of the time. Soon after this response, Thayer drew up his will, leaving his art collection the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City rather than his hometown's Worcester Art Museum, where his large collection ended up on loan. At Thayer's death, the Worcester museum would be dealt a huge blow when the heart of its collection was moved to New York.

Thayer entered Harvard in 1909. His education began somewhat unimpressively with C grades on essays, but by his final year he was doing well enough to receive a scholarship. He became involved with the literary magazine the Harvard Advocate, attached himself to George Santayana, and met many aspiring writers, some of whom would later work at and write for The Dial. He met and was impressed by the poet Alan Seeger, and one of Thayer's poems received a letter of admiration from an underclassman named E. E. Cummings.

This chapter presents an illustrated chronology of important biographical moments and historical events, including the publication of various novels. It begins in 1840, when the U.S. population was estimated at 17 million and Transcendentalists published The Dial, to 1922, when James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room were published. Also cited is the publication in 1875–1876 of Henry James's first acknowledged novel Roderick Hudson.