Margaret Anderson

Margaret Anderson (born November 24, 1886, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died October 18, 1973, Le Cannet, France) was an American editor, publisher, and writer who founded The Little Review magazine, an avant-garde “little magazine” in which she introduced works by many of the best-known American and British writers of the 20th century. Published between 1914 and 1929, The Little Review played a significant role in the Modernist literary movement, championing experimental and controversial works and publishing editorials on topics such as gay rights and feminism. Of the magazine’s risk-taking, Anderson wrote in her autobiography, “Practically everything the Little Review published during its first years was material that would have been accepted by no other magazine in the world at the moment.”

Early career and founding The Little Review

Anderson was reared in a conventional Midwestern home and educated at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. She renounced the “bourgeois” values of her background at an early age and moved to Chicago. There she worked as a book reviewer for a religious weekly before joining the staff of The Dial, a literary review. In 1914 she founded The Little Review, a magazine of the arts that announced itself as devoted to “Life for Art’s sake” and that succeeded in becoming foremost in its field. With her longtime associate and companion, Jane Heap, Anderson published the magazine regularly with no ascertainable resources and attracted many of the best writers in the country, although they were paid nothing.

“A Magazine of the Arts”

Anderson, by a combination of luck, energy, and a fascination with anything novel, produced a magazine of legendary quality. For six months in 1914, after her financial backers abandoned The Little Review, she lost her home and offices and camped with family and staff members on the shores of Lake Michigan. Once, to protest the temporary lack of exciting new works, she issued 64 blank pages between covers. Among those who contributed to the magazine were Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Emma Goldman, and Malcolm Cowley.

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In 1917 American poet and critic Ezra Pound, then based in London, was engaged as foreign editor. Through his influence The Little Review published works by William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and James Joyce. When Anderson began serializing Joyce’s Ulysses in The Little Review in 1918, the U.S. Post Office seized and burned four issues of the magazine and then convicted Anderson and associate editor Heap on obscenity charges; each was fined $50. Nevertheless, Anderson continued to publish the magazine.

Later years and death

In the 1920s Anderson and Heap moved to Paris. By 1924 their personal relationship had ended and Anderson had become a devotee of Armenian spiritual leader and mystic George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Heap took over as editor of The Little Review, which continued to be published for five more years.

Anderson and Heap remained important figures among the avant-garde literary and artistic communities in Europe and the United States. In 1924 Anderson, who was also a pianist, began a relationship with French opera singer Georgette Leblanc, and the two women performed together on a concert tour of the United States. She remained with Leblanc until the singer’s death in 1941. Several years later she met Dorothy Caruso, the widow of opera singer Enrico Caruso; she was Dorothy’s companion until her death in 1955.

Anderson died of emphysema in 1973. She is buried beside Leblanc in the cemetery of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Anges in Le Cannet, France.

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Writing and biographies

Anderson’s writing includes her three-volume autobiography, consisting of My Thirty Years’ War (1930), The Fiery Fountains (1951), and The Strange Necessity (1962). The Little Review Anthology was published in 1953, and the memoir The Unknowable Gurdjieff was released in 1962. Forbidden Fires, a work of fiction by Anderson, was posthumously published in 1996.

Biographies include Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the “Little Review” (2023) by Holly A. Baggett and A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature (2025) by Adam Morgan.