Born on November 15, 1887 near St. Louis, Missouri, Marianne Moore was educated at Bryn Mawr College where she took a bachelor’s degree in 1909. Subsequently, she studied and worked as a typist and a schoolteacher and eventually moved to New York City where she worked at the New York Public Library. There she met with other poets and began developing her own work. She was first published in the Dial, and later served as its editor from 1925-1929. Moore’s early work was featured in the British magazine the Egoist along with Ezra Pound and W.C. Williams. Hilda Doolittle, a classmate from Bryn Mawr, published Moore’s first book of poetry, entitled Poems, in 1921. Widely read and appreciated during her own lifetime, Moore received numerous honors and awards. In addition to the Bollingen Prize in 1951, she also won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Some of her collections of poems include: Observations (1924), Selected Poems (1935), The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), Like a Bulwark (1956), O to Be a Dragon (1959), and The Arctic Fox (1964). Marianne Moore died in New York City in 1974.

The Dial archive is housed at the Beinecke Library; for a detailed description of the collection visit the Guide to the Dial Papers. Selected materials from the archive can be seen online in the Beinecke’s Digital Library: Dial Papers. Additional related resources in Beinecke Library collections may be found in Orbis and the Finding Aid Database.