D. H. Lawrence and The Dial

From September 1920until July 1929, the last issue of the Dial, thirty of Lawrence’s works appeared in twenty-five issues of this brilliant magazine founded by Scofield Thayer. The Dial affected the course of Lawrence’s later life. Thayer induced Lawrence to write Sea and Sardinia; Mabel Dodge Sterne (later Luhan) read Sea and Sardinia in the Dial and persuaded Lawrence to come to America; and Marianne Moore unwittingly helped Lawrence get his final volume of verse, Pansies, past British postal censors.

The authors here have composed from scattered details a coherent narrative that not only informs Lawrence scholars and little magazines’ devotees but will entertain more leisurely readers. The published letters and diaries of Lawrence are complemented by unpublished correspondence and by the Dial’s files, hitherto inaccessible. Questions and conjectures that hang over Lawrence’s life in this period are here qualified and answered.

Nicholas Joost is Professor of English and Alvin Sullivan an instructor in English at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.