An excerpt from: The “Dial” File, by Christa Sammons; originally published in the Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 62, No. 1/2 (October 1987), pp. 12-18:
On 10 April 1987 Yale University, with the help of the Beinecke Foundation, Inc., purchased the archive of the Dial, the leading American journal of literature and art of the 1920s, for the Yale Collection of American Literature. At the time of the purchase, Ralph Franklin, director of the Beinecke Library, noted that “today’s transaction completed the process begun at Yale almost forty years ago to document this important chapter in American literary history.” The following excerpts and notes from the American Literature Collection “Dial file” document that process—one that seemed at times to falter, as the Dial papers were twice threatened by dismemberment, but which has finally been brought to a successful resolution.
As a prominent forum for modernist poetry, art, and writing, the Dial was of distinct interest to Yale’s Collection of American Literature. But by the 1940s, when the American Literature Collection began its rapid development under the leadership of Donald Gallup, the co-owner of the Dial, Scofield Thayer, was incapacitated by ill health. Mr. Gallup began negotiations with Thayer’s partner in the enterprise.
Image: Advertisement for the Dial