Lincoln MacVeagh, from "Life"
Lincoln MacVeagh (1890-1972) began The Dial Press, housed in the same building as The Dial magazine, in 1923. He published Moore’s Observations in 1924 (and in a second edition in 1925). MacVeagh spent much of his career as a diplomat and so does not figure as prominently in the history of Modernist letters as his literary efforts warrant.
The description of some of MacVeagh’s papers at Princeton outlines his birth, education, and diplomatic career. http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead/getEad?eadid=MC067&kw= Because those papers concern only the years 1932-45, it is understandable that the description does not focus on The Dial Press.
MacVeagh went to work for Henry Holt and Company in 1915. There he might have had a hand in the publication of work by Robert Frost, Padraic Colum, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Carl Sandburg, Stephen Vincent Benet, and A. E. Houseman, whose work Holt featured before MacVeagh left in 1923. Clearly his own choices, the backlist of The Dial Press, includes work by Ralph Mottram, Glenway Wescott, E. E. Cummings, Maxim Gorky, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Theodore Dreiser, Elizabeth Bowen, Bravig Imbs, and Jean Giraudoux, among many others. MacVeagh’s list overlaps that of Dial magazine contributors in many instances. MacVeagh sold the press in 1933 when President Roosevelt appointed him Minister Plenipotentiary to Greece, the first in a series of posts that would include Iceland, South Africa, Egypt, Portugal and Spain.
The papers of The Dial Press are at the Beinecke Library at Yale: http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/beinecke.dialpress.con.html#a9
Marianne Moore: Poetry 