The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

The influential literary magazine The Dial is regarded as a titanic artistic and aesthetic achievement for having published most of the great modernist writers, artists, and critics of its day. As publisher and editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1926, Scofield Thayer was gatekeeper and guide for the movement, introducing the ideas of literary modernism to America and giving American artists a new audience in Europe.

In The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer, James Dempsey looks beyond the public figure best known for publishing the work of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore to reveal a paradoxical man fraught with indecisions and insatiable appetites, and deeply conflicted about the artistic movement to which he was benefactor and patron. Thayer suffered from schizophrenia and faded from public life upon his resignation from The Dial. Because of his mental illness and controversial life, his guardians refused to allow anything of a personal nature to appear in previous biographies. The story of Thayer's unmoored and peripatetic life, which in many ways mirrored the cosmopolitan rootlessness of modernism, has never been fully told until now.

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The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

The influential literary magazine The Dial is regarded as a titanic artistic and aesthetic achievement for having published most of the great modernist writers, artists, and critics of its day. As publisher and editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1926, Scofield Thayer was gatekeeper and guide for the movement, introducing the ideas of literary modernism to America and giving American artists a new audience in Europe.

In The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer, James Dempsey looks beyond the public figure best known for publishing the work of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore to reveal a paradoxical man fraught with indecisions and insatiable appetites, and deeply conflicted about the artistic movement to which he was benefactor and patron. Thayer suffered from schizophrenia and faded from public life upon his resignation from The Dial. Because of his mental illness and controversial life, his guardians refused to allow anything of a personal nature to appear in previous biographies. The story of Thayer's unmoored and peripatetic life, which in many ways mirrored the cosmopolitan rootlessness of modernism, has never been fully told until now.

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The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

by James Dempsey
The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

by James Dempsey

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Overview

The influential literary magazine The Dial is regarded as a titanic artistic and aesthetic achievement for having published most of the great modernist writers, artists, and critics of its day. As publisher and editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1926, Scofield Thayer was gatekeeper and guide for the movement, introducing the ideas of literary modernism to America and giving American artists a new audience in Europe.

In The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer, James Dempsey looks beyond the public figure best known for publishing the work of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Marianne Moore to reveal a paradoxical man fraught with indecisions and insatiable appetites, and deeply conflicted about the artistic movement to which he was benefactor and patron. Thayer suffered from schizophrenia and faded from public life upon his resignation from The Dial. Because of his mental illness and controversial life, his guardians refused to allow anything of a personal nature to appear in previous biographies. The story of Thayer's unmoored and peripatetic life, which in many ways mirrored the cosmopolitan rootlessness of modernism, has never been fully told until now.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780813047539
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Publication date: 02/11/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 240
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

James Dempsey, instructor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is the author of The Court Poetry of Chaucer, Zakary’s Zombies, and Murphy’s American Dream.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xv

1 An Intellectual Sewer 1

2 Homes of Virtue 7

3 Harvard 15

4 Oxford during the War 19

5 The Chicago Experiment 29

6 Lady of the Sonnets 35

7 Death of the Prophet 47

8 To the Center of Things 56

9 Starting with a Bang 63

10 Manhattan Love Stories 73

11 Anti-Epithalamion 87

12 To the Great Master 94

13 Assessing the Modern 105

14 A Millionaire in Red Vienna 115

15 Teuton versus Francophile 122

16 Barnes in Eruption 128

17 Feuds Galore 138

18 Annus Belli 149

19 Freudless in Vienna 158

20 Return of the Prodigal 165

21 The Death of the Dial 175

22 Thayer in Eclipse 179

23 Postmortem 185

God, Stars, and Sea: Thayer's Poetic Legacy 190

Notes 205

Bibliography 225

Index 231

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