The Little Review

Overview

Founded by Margaret Anderson in March 1914, The Little Review was one of the chief periodicals in the English-speaking world for publishing experimental writing and publicizing international art. The American magazine is famous today for its many bold gestures on behalf of the avant-garde.  The September 1916 issue, for example,  protested the lack of acceptable material by leaving most of its pages blank and just below the title, adding this phrase:  "Making No Compromise with the Public Taste."

The Little Review is also remembered for its broad spectrum of interests, representing various schools of art from multiple countries. Anderson first published The Little Review in Chicago, the periodical was temporarily in San Francisco before later moving the to New York in 1917. The periodical eventually crossed the Atlantic and was published in Paris for a time, Ezra Pound being acting as a foreign editor. Ironically, despite its name, the stretch of The Little Review extended across continents and oceans becoming a great catalyst for the distribution of transatlantic modernist literature.

During its first three years, The Little Review was a publication heavy with controversial and edgy literature that defended modernist ideas of imagism and published such writers as Richard Aldington, Maxwell Bodenheim, Ben Hecht, and Amy Lowell. Under the foreign influence of Ezra Pound, the magazine experienced a fresh infusion of international experimentalism and added contributions by other modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot,  May Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, W. C. Williams, and W. B. Yeats.

The Little Review's most lasting achievement was its serialization of Joyce's Ulysses from 1918 to 1920. Eventually the Society for the Suppression of Vice charged the magazine with obscenity for publishing Joyce's piece and the editors were taken to court. Anderson and Heap lost the court trial and were forced to discontinue publishing the novel.