The Little Magazine That Defied American Censorship
Margaret Anderson was charismatic, queer, and cutting. Born in 1886, she already had unusually deep feelings about language even as a child. (When she learned that the word “ball” wasn’t spelled “boll” as she thought it should be, she felt “a resentment against God or man for having imposed an incredible stupidity upon the world.”) Her youth in Indiana was a lonely struggle, for the most part. She began finding a trace of steady happiness only after a slightly scandalous move to Chicago: She stayed at the YWCA and was soon cut off by most of her genteel Midwestern family. She was exactly where she was meant to be. “I always edit everything,” she wrote, in a kind of manifesto of the self. “I edit people’s clothes.… tones of voice, their laughter, their words.… It is this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor.” One of her employers was Francis Hackett at the Chicago Evening Post, who would go on to become the founding literary editor of The New Republic.
Anderson’s early professional life flourished in Chicago, and the book is in part a love letter to the city. Chicago gave her a place to find her voice without feeling it was being shaped or modulated by an existing aesthetic. English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy wrote Anderson in a letter, “… what kills most literary effort is the hothouse air of temples, clubs, and coteries, that, never changed, breeds in us by turns febrility and torpor.” She would later find New York crawling with coteries, conducive to that very febrility and torpor, and, though she eventually traded the United States for France, she kept Chicago in her heart.
Working out of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue, Anderson started The Little Review there in 1914. The precariousness of the project, especially when it came to money, was no match for her will power and imagination. “My greatest enemy is reality,” she would write in the opening pages of her memoir. She had covers printed with the words, “Making No Compromise With the Public Taste.” For the summer months of 1915, after running out of cash and losing her apartment, Anderson moved into a lakeside tent compound and edited The Little Review “by the light of a flaming gasoline torch.” Emma Goldman visited, grumbled about mosquitoes, and demurred when Anderson—clad in a baby-blue bathing suit—urged her to take off her clothes.