The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer
by James Dempsey
“What do you call a person who was slandered by Ernest Hemingway, cuckolded by E.E. Cummings, befriended and promoted T.S. Eliot, treated by Sigmund Freud, led modernist art’s charge into American culture in the 1920s and declared officially insane not long after? … A damn good subject for a biography.”—Worcester Magazine
The story of Scofield Thayer’s unmoored and peripatetic life, which in many ways mirrored the cosmopolitan rootlessness of modernism, has never been fully told until now. From 1920 to 1926 Thayer was publisher and editor of The Dial, an influential literary magazine that published most of the great modernist writers, artists, and critics of its day. James Dempsey’s new book reveals a paradoxical man fraught with indecisions and insatiable appetites, and deeply conflicted about the artistic movement to which he was benefactor and patron.
If you are in the Worcester, MA area, you can hear the author discuss his book on March 20 at the Worcester Historical Museum. Click here for details.
