Маргарет Андерсон и журнал «The Little Review»: История американского литературного авангарда.

American magazine editor

Margaret Caroline Anderson (November 24, 1886 – October 19, 1973) was the American founder, editor and publisher of the art and literary magazine The Little Review, which published a collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. The periodical is most noted for introducing many prominent American and British writers of the 20th century, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, in the United States and publishing the first thirteen chapters of James Joyce's then unpublished novel Ulysses. A large collection of her papers on Gurdjieff's teaching is now preserved at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Anderson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the eldest of three daughters of Arthur Aubrey Anderson and Jessie (Shortridge) Anderson. She graduated from high school in Anderson, Indiana, in 1903, and then entered a two year junior preparatory class at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio.

In 1906 she left college at the end of her freshman year to pursue a career as a pianist. In the fall of 1908 she left home for Chicago, where she reviewed books for a religious weekly (The Continent) before joining The Dial. By 1913 she was a book critic for the Chicago Evening Post.

In 1917, they moved to New York's Greenwich Village. With the help of critic Ezra Pound, who acted as her foreign editor in London, The Little Review published some of the most influential new writers in the English language, including Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Pound himself, and William Butler Yeats. The magazine's most published poet was New York dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, with whom Heap became friends on the basis of their shared confrontational feminist and artistic agendas. Other notable contributors included Sherwood Anderson, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Malcolm Cowley, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Francis Picabia, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Waley, and William Carlos Williams. Even so, however, she once published an issue with a dozen blank pages to protest the temporary lack of exciting new works. In 1918, starting with the March issue, The Little Review began serializing James Joyce's Ulysses. Over time the U. S. Post Office seized and burned four issues of the magazine, and Anderson and her companion and associate editor, Jane Heap, were convicted of obscenity charges. 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 Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven’s sexually explicit poetry and outspoken defense of Joyce. During the trial in February, 1921, hundreds of "Greenwich Villagers", men and women, marched into Special Court Sessions; eventually, Anderson and Heap were each fined $100 and fingerprinted.

In early 1924, through Alfred Richard Orage, Anderson learned of spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, and saw performances of his 'Sacred dances', first at the 'Neighbourhood Playhouse', and later at Carnegie Hall. Shortly after Gurdjieff's automobile accident, Anderson, along with Georgette Leblanc, Jane Heap and Monique Surrere, moved to France to visit him at Fountainebleau Avon, where he had set up his institute at Château du Prieuré in Avon. Anderson and Heap adopted the two sons of Anderson's ailing sister, Lois. They brought Lois and sons Tom and Arthur "Fritz" Peters to Prieuré in June 1924. After they returned to New York in 1925, the two boys were taken in by Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. In 1929, Solita Solano had an affair with Anderson, who had come to Paris with her lover, French singer Georgette Leblanc. The affair lasted several years, though Anderson remained living with Leblanc. In 1929, Anderson and Heap separated. In 1929, Heap put out the final issue of The Little Review, edited at Hotel St. Germain Des Pres, 36 rue Bonaparte, Paris. In 1929, Heap moved to England. In 1935, Jane Heap moved to London, where Heap led Gurdjieff study groups until her death in 1964. Along with Katherine Mansfield and Jane Heap, she remains one of the most noted disciples at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, at Fontainebleau, near Paris, from October 1922 to 1924. Anderson studied with Gurdjieff in France until his death in October 1949, writing about him and his teachings in most of her books, most extensively in her memoir, The Unknowable Gurdjieff.

In 1942, evacuating from the war in France, Anderson sailed for the United States. With her passage paid by Ernest Hemingway, Anderson met on the voyage Dorothy Caruso, widow of the famous tenor Enrico Caruso. The two began a romantic relationship, became lovers, and lived together, in New York,

Anderson was the subject of an Academy Award–nominated documentary entitled Beyond Imagining: Margaret Anderson and the "Little Review" in 1991, by Wendy L. Weinberg. An exhibition, "Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson and the Little Review", celebrated the life and work of Margaret Anderson and the Little Reviews remarkable influence. It opened at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, in October, 2006, and ran for three months.

In 2006 Anderson and Jane Heap were inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. In 2014, Anderson was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Anderson published a three volume autobiography: My Thirty Years' War (1930), The Fiery Fountains, and The Strange Necessity in her last years in Le Cannet. There she wrote her final book, the novel and memoir, Forbidden Fires. 1930: 1951: The Fiery Fountains: The Autobiography: Continuation and Crisis to 1950, 1953: The Little Review Anthology, Hermitage House, 1953. 1959: Margaret C. Anderson Correspondence with Ben and Rose Caylor Hecht. 1962: The Strange Necessity: The Autobiography, 1962: The Unknowable Gurdjieff, memoir, dedicated to Jane Heap. 1962, Arkana. 1996: Forbidden Fires, part memoir, part novel, Ed. by Mathilda M. Hills. .

Margaret C. Anderson Papers, 1930 1973 (0.6 cubic feet) are housed at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Archives Department. Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection of Margaret Anderson, 1886 1998 (17.71 linear feet) are housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.