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American literary magazine

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.

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: <blockquote>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 (in the "Nausicaa" episode) and no one is corrupted. 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”.

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. 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”. 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. In particular, some readers were not amused by cartoons illustrating the daily activities of the editor. The cartoons picture the editor riding her horse, playing piano, and attending Emma Goldman lectures, among other activities.

The Spring 1923 “Exiles” issue is noteworthy because it published works by American expatriates living in Paris as well as the Parisian avant garde including Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, George Antheil, E. E. Cummings, Fernand Léger, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Perhaps the most important contribution of this issue was its publication of six vignettes from Hemingway's debut novel in our time. Beyond Hemingway's work, the issue is noteworthy due to its inclusion of avant garde French artists such as Fernand Léger and Jean Cocteau as well its experimental front cover that reflected the tastes of editor Jane Heap.

The 1929 issue of The Little Review ended the magazine's run with “Confessions and Letters” from over fifty individuals in the arts, including James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound. The questionnaire, primarily designed by Jane Heap, perturbed many of the artists, and they often responded with comments that they found the questions mundane and uninteresting. Emma Goldman, for example, justified her delayed response by complaining that the questions themselves bored her. She writes, “I have not written sooner because I find the questions really terribly uninteresting,” and continues that “since the questions are so ordinary the replies can be naught else.” Even Anderson and Heap agreed that the questions were unproductive: Anderson ended the magazine's run with an editorial in the 1929 issue in which she stated in reference to the questionnaire that “even the artist doesn't know what he’s talking about.”

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. Celebrating the life and work of Margaret Anderson and the Little Reviews 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.