The Little Review was launched in Chicago in March 1914 as a
monthly literary magazine. Founded by Margaret Carolyn Anderson, it was intended to be "an
organ of two interests, art and good talk about art." In the first issue, alongside new
works by the Chicago poets Arthur Davidson Ficke and Eunice Tietjens, Anderson published
celebrations of feminism, psychoanalysis, and Nietzsche. For the next two years the Little Review featured works by Imagist poets and political
writings by anarchists such as Emma Goldman.
When Jane Heap, fresh from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, joined the staff,
the magazine became more interested in the plastic arts and began using modernistic
typography and publishing photographic illustrations of works by contemporary painters,
sculptors, and photographers. Literature remained as the magazine's principal interest.
In 1917, the Little Review moved to New York. During the
next few years the editors accelerated the magazine's commitment to radical literary
experimentation, publishing some of the cornerstones of the modern movement in literature,
including works by Louis Aragon, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and
William Butler Yeats. Many of these writings were solicited by Pound, who served as the
magazine's foreign editor from 1917 to 1919. Among his major achievements was his arranging
for the serialization of Joyce's Ulysses in the Little Review.
In 1921, as funds grew increasingly scarce, the magazine began to appear quarterly. In
1922, the Little Review moved once again, this time to Paris.
Issues appeared sporadically until 1926, when publication was suspended. One final issue of
the Little Review appeared in 1929.
