Clark, Elizabeth Jenks

Margaret Anderson was born November 24, 1886 in Indianapolis, Indiana to Arthur Aubrey Anderson and Jessie Shortridge Anderson. The eldest of three daughters, she attended high school in Anderson, Indiana and attended a two-year junior preparatory class at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. Increasingly drawn to music, Anderson left college to pursue a career as a pianist. In the fall of 1908, she left Indiana and moved to Chicago with her sister Lois, where she reviewed books for The Continent until she joined the staff of The Dial . By 1913 she was also a book critic for the Chicago Evening Post, which at that time shared a building with The Dial . According to Anderson, during that time she learned monotype, linotype and proofreading at The Dial . Bored at the Chicago Evening Post, she decided to edit her own magazine, giving it the title of Little Review . The Little Review was launched as a monthly publication in March of 1914. Anderson's main goal was to publish creative criticism.

In 1916, Margaret Anderson met Jane Heap. Heap was born in Topeka, Kansas and moved to Chicago to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually becoming an art teacher at the Lewis Institute. Soon after the two women met, they fell in love and moved in together. Heap joined Anderson as co-editor of the Little Review, maintaining a low profile by using a number of pseudonyms, such as "R" and "Garnerin" and usually signing pieces just "jh," but she had an enormous influence. After briefly moving the magazine to Mill Valley, California, Anderson and Heap then moved it to New York City in 1917 with the help of critic Ezra Pound, who the same year started his two-year tenure as foreign editor of the Little Review in London. Pound's contribution to the magazine was profound since he had strong relationships with many European experimental writers, and he informed the direction of the magazine until its end. The Little Review 's opinion on current art and literature was influential and the magazine stated opinions frankly; in 1916 Anderson and Heap printed an issue entirely of blank pages, a statement on the quality of the current submissions. Total editorial control was important to Anderson and Heap: they were careful to not accept financial support in fear that the supporters' opinions would affect the content. In 1918, Pound sent parts of James Joyce's Ulysses to Anderson and Heap and the Little Review began publishing excerpts of the manuscript. In 1920, at half-way through the novel, the United States Post Office seized and burned issues of the magazine, charging it obscene. In 1921 a court convicted Anderson and Heap on obscenity charges and fined each woman fifty dollars. The trial garnered a great deal of publicity for all parties involved.

...