The Little Review
The Little Review was an American avant-garde literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson in Chicago's historic Fine Arts Building, published literary and art work from 1914 to May 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.
History
Margaret Anderson conceived The Little Review in 1914 during the Chicago Literary Renaissance, naming it in honor of the Chicago Little Theatre, a leader in championing new drama and prime mover in the nascent Little Theatre Movement. In The Little Review’s opening editorial, Anderson called for the creation of a new form of criticism for art, emphasizing, “... criticism 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”. This philosophy would shape the magazine throughout its fifteen-year run. 1915-1917, Harriet Dean was a fund raiser. 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 with 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.In 1916, The Little Review was published, for a while, in San Francisco.
Ezra Pound approached Anderson in late 1916 to help with the magazine, explaining, “he Little Review is perhaps temperamentally closer to what I want done”. Pound became foreign editor in 1917.
In 1917, The Little Review moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, then Margaret C. Anderson took it to Paris.
Obscenity trial of ''Ulysses''
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 that Ulysses constituted 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, ultimately losing. The editors paid a fifty-dollar fine each as result of the judgment. Anderson briefly considered folding the magazine after the trial.The trial was discussed in Girls Lean Back Everywhere by First Amendment attorney Edward de Grazia, whose book was titled based on a quote from Jane Heap. In response to John Summer, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who initiated the suppression, Heap wrote of James Joyce:
Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere--seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom --and no one is corrupted.
Although the obscenity trial was ostensibly about Ulysses, Irene Gammel argues that The Little Review came under attack for its overall subversive tone and, in particular, its publication of the sexually explicit writings of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Heap championed the Baroness's Dada poetry, printing it alongside the serialization of Ulysses from 1918-1921 and making Freytag-Loringhoven the journal's most frequently printed poet. Heap and the Baroness shared a confrontational feminist agenda. Gammel writes, “If Heap was the field marshall for The Little Reviews vanguard battle against puritan conventions and traditional sexual aesthetics, then the Baroness was to become its fighting machine”. Following the obscenity trial, Anderson and Heap were forced to restrict the magazine's content to less inflammatory material, and they no longer printed their motto, “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste”.
Post-trial
In 1923, Anderson and Heap traveled to Paris and met Pound and other literary expatriates during the 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. From 1924 to 1927, Heap owned and operated The Little Review Gallery, which featured primarily European modernists.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.” 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”.
Content and noteworthy issues
Though the April 1920 issue instigated the famous obscenity trial of Ulysses, several other issues gained the magazine notoriety.True to its four pronged goal to publish "Literature, Drama, Music, Art", The Little Review began as a journal of criticism but also published original poetry and fiction. During the first few years, the magazine published pieces that championed anarchy as well as Ezra Pound's experimental poetry called Imagism. Topics covered in the first issue included feminist book reviews, an essay about Nietzsche, and literary pieces written by Floyd Dell, Rupert Brooke, and Alice Meynell. The pieces Margaret Anderson selected for this first issue established the magazine's concern with feminism, art, conversation, and criticism that it pursued throughout its run.