Margaret Anderson

  • Born: November 24, 1886
  • Birthplace: Indianapolis, Indiana
  • Died: October 18, 1973
  • Place of death: Le Cannet, France

Biography

Margaret Carolyn Anderson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 24, 1886. She spent most of her childhood in Columbus, Indiana, despising the country club social life of her parents, Arthur Aubrey Anderson, a railroad executive, and Jesse (Shortridge) Anderson. Always attracted to the arts, she enrolled in Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, at the age of sixteen, where she studied piano for a time but lost interest and dropped out before completing the program. When she was twenty- one she fled to Chicago, where she found a more satisfying lifestyle in a city that was attracting many literary and artistic icons. There she met such important figures as writers Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. She became literary editor of the Dial but resigned following unwelcome advances by its editor-in-chief.lm-sp-ency-bio-269472-153580.jpg

In 1913 Anderson became the literary editor of a religious journal, Continent, and the following year made her mark by founding the Little Review, which became one of the leading lights of the movement known as the Chicago Renaissance. Its masthead proclaimed it “a Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste.” Anderson’s intransigence made financial support difficult to find, and she and her partner Jane Heap were forced to live for several months in a tent on the shore of Lake Michigan. Little Review, however, attracted some of the leading writers of the day despite the fact that Anderson and Heap could not afford to pay for contributions. Among the writers whose work appeared in the magazine were Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens, and Malcolm Cowley.

Having established the magazine as the leading journal of its kind, Anderson was able to enlist poet Ezra Pound as her foreign editor. He in turn elicited contributions from poets of the stature of William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. The most momentous of the foreign contributions was James Joyce’s Ulysses, serialized in the magazine beginning in 1918, when Anderson moved her operation to Greenwich Village in New York City. Issues containing installments of this allegedly salacious novel were confiscated by postal authorities, however, and the book was eventually banned as obscene in the United States.

In 1924, Anderson moved again, this time to Paris, where the Little Review promoted such avant- garde artistic movements as cubism, dadaism, and surrealism. She ceased publishing her magazine in 1929 and devoted much of her time thereafter to writing her autobiography.

Anderson formed her closest friendships with women. Although she never proclaimed herself a lesbian, she lived for a number of years with Heap, then with the French singer and actress, Georgette Leblanc, and finally with Dorothy Caruso, the widow of Enrico. She lived chiefly in France until her death on October 18, 1973.

A beautiful woman and a brilliant conversationalist, Anderson is primarily known for her astonishing success in promoting the cause of serious literature in the United States during an era dominated by provincially moralistic canons of literary taste.