Margaret Anderson and The Little Review

Margaret C. Anderson was part of the "Chicago Renaissance" literary movement in the early 1900s. Anderson began writing book reviews for a religious weekly, The Continent, shortly after her arrival in Chicago. Later she joined the staff of Francis F. Browne's magazine, The Dial. By 1913 she was a book critic for the Chicago Evening Post. Having become bored with her work at the Post, she decided to edit her own magazine, The Little Review.

The magazine was launched as a monthly in March of 1914. Anderson's main goal was to publish creative criticism. The first issue featured praise of Nietzsche, feminism, and psychoanalysis, along with new works by the Chicago poets Arthur Davidson Ficke and Eunice Tietjens. For the next two years Anderson published works by Imagist poets and also featured the political writings of such anarchists as Emma Goldman.

When Jane Heap, fresh from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, joined the staff, the magazine became more interested in fine and graphic arts and began using modernistic typography and publishing photographic illustrations of works by contemporary painters, sculptors, and photographers.

In 1917, The Little Review moved to New York. During the next few years the editors accelerated the magazine's commitment to radical literary experimentation, publishing some of the cornerstones of the modern movement in literature, including works by Louis Aragon, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats. Many of these writings were solicited by Pound, who served as the magazine's foreign editor from 1917 to 1919. Among his major achievements was his arranging for the serialization of Joyce's Ulysses in The Little Review.

When in 1918, The Little Review began printing extracts from James Joyce's Ulysses, Margaret Anderson and Jean Heap were arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. The book later became one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century.

Margaret Anderson, The Little Review and communication:

Margaret Anderson was both a writer and a visionary editor who fought to publish ground-breaking art and liturature. The Little Review also communicated visually through graphically inventive layout.

In the Archives: The Margaret Anderson Collection contains personal correspondance, including material about her writing. as well as a scrapbook of photos. The Little Review Collection contains editorial files, corrected and uncorrected galleys of works, correspondence, holograph manuscripts, and typescripts.