Cover of The Dial that also lists its content and page numbers, the paper now a light rust color

The Dial, vol. 73, no. 5
Greenwich, Connecticut: Dial Publishing Company, November 1922
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

The Dial, vol. 73, no. 5

This issue of The Dial includes the first American appearance of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. He had offered the unfinished poem to the literary magazine in January 1922, and its editor, Scofield Thayer, had bid $150 for it sight unseen. Months of negotiations followed, with the American lawyer and literary patron John Quinn assisting Eliot; he had told Quinn that “I think it is the best I have ever done.” In The Dial—one of the preeminent modernist journals of arts and letters in America—Eliot’s poem appeared alongside the work of Mina Loy, Pablo Picasso, W.B. Yeats, and others. Eliot later gave the original draft (on view above) to Quinn in thanks for his assistance with the contracts and as a mark of their friendship.

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