Archival Evidence

''The Dial's'' advertising provides contextual insight to the bibliography of ''The Waste Land's'' American debut. Instead of juxtaposing advertising alongside text, ''The Dial'' allocated primary and secondary sections--at the front and back of the periodical respectively--for commercial bulletins.  In the first section of advertisements that precedes the literary text, the editor installed ads for literary publishers of modernist books, memoirs, and a magazine (''The Dial'' I-XVI). This indicates that ''The Dial'' targeted a bibliophile audience through a variety of texts, such as ''Steel: The Diary of A Furnace Worker'' and an encyclopedia of college courses.

''The Dial'''s advertisements reveal multicultural intrigue through a great deal of upper-class marketing in the supplementary section of advertisements.  Solicitors invite attention to Oriental rug wholesalers, Steinway pianos, jewelry dealers, Russian tea rooms, Spanish themed vacations, patronage to The Plaza hotel in New York and Boston, and to purchase multi-volume literary collections from such venerated authors as Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad (''The Dial'' XVI-XXXII).  Though the advertisements do suggest a post-war fascination with the exotic, they also implicate intellectual and societal elitism.  One may inquire whether the "worldly" audience could have included the minorities it so fancifully publicized.