The Little Review, an American literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson, published literary and art work from 1914 to 1929. With the help of Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, Anderson created a magazine that featured a wide variety of transatlantic modernists and cultivated many early examples of experimental writing and art. Many contributors were American, British, Irish, and French. In addition to publishing a variety of international literature, The Little Review printed early examples of surrealist artwork and Dadaism. The magazine’s most well known work was the serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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Margaret Anderson conceived The Little Review in 1914 during the Chicago Literary Renaissance. In The Little Review’s opening editorial, Anderson called for the creation of a new form of criticism for art, emphasizing, “[C]riticism as an art has not flourished in this country. We live too swiftly to have time to be appreciative; and criticism, after all, has only one synonym: appreciation.”.[1] This philosophy would shape the magazine throughout its fifteen-year run. In the early years, The Little Review published a variety of literature, essays, and poetry. The magazine advocated themes like feminism and even anarchism for a short time. Emma Goldman was a key figure during The Little Review’s brief affiliation for anarchism: Goldman was a regular contributor and Anderson wrote editorials advocating anarchism and art. In 1916, Heap became the magazine’s co-editor and stayed with the magazine until 1929. Pound approached Anderson in late 1916 to help with the magazine, explaining, “[T]he Little Review is perhaps temperamentally closer to what I want done.”.[2] As a result, Pound became foreign editor in 1917.
In the same year, The Little Review moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. The magazine serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses starting in 1918. The Little Review continued to publish Ulysses until 1921 when the Post Office seized copies of the magazine and refused to distribute them on the grounds of obscene material. As a result, the magazine, Anderson, and Heap went to trial over the Ulysses questionable content. John Quinn, a lawyer and well-known patron of modernist art, defended them at the trial. The editors paid a fifty-dollar fine each as result of the judgment. Anderson briefly considered folding the magazine after the trial.
In 1923, Anderson and Heap traveled to Paris and met Pound and other literary expatriates during their trip. While The Little Review continued to publish, publication had become irregular during this time. By 1925, after being in Europe for a time, Anderson and Heap parted ways: Heap returned to New York with The Little Review and Anderson remained in Europe.
Between 1925 and 1929, Heap, as the new editor, made The Little Review “the American mouthpiece for all the new systems of art that the modern world had produced.” [3] Under Heap’s editorship, the magazine published more art in addition to literature and organized two expositions in conjunction with the magazine. The expositions were titled The Machine-Age Exposition and The International Theatre Exposition. In May 1929, the final issue of The Little Review appeared as a series of letters and questionnaires from past contributors. Anderson reflects in her autobiography, My Thirty Years’ War, after creating the magazine as place to record her own thoughts “I decided that there had been enough of this. Everyone was doing it—the artist above all”.[4]
Sherwood Anderson
Hart Crane
Floyd Dell
Hilda Doolittle
T.S. Eliot
Emma Goldman
James Joyce
Amy Lowell
Mina Loy
Gertrude Stein
Sara Teasdale (under the pseudonym "Frances Trevor") [5]
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
William Carlos Williams
Hans Arp
Lawrence Atkinson
Jean de Busschere
Max Ernst
Fernand Léger
Francis Picabia
Pablo Picasso
Joseph Stella
The magazine was the subject of an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject nominated documentary, titled, Beyond Imagining: Margaret Anderson and the "Little Review" (1991), by Wendy L. Weinberg.[6][7]
Celebrating the life and work of Margaret Anderson and the Little Review’s remarkable influence, an exhibition “Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson and the Little Review” was opened at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, in October 2006 for three months.[8]