One aspect of the Lost Generation that we haven’t touched on yet are the many small literary journals of the time and so I thought we’d start with an intro to one of the most important, The Little Review, born in my hometown of Chicago.
Running from 1914 to 1929, Margaret Anderson began The Little Review from her house at 837 W. Ainslie Street in Uptown, with the magazine’s offices at the Chicago Fine Arts building at 410 S. Michigan Avenue. Shortly thereafter, due to monetary issues, she, her family, and staff members had to camp on the shores of Lake Michigan for six months.
Despite that and other setbacks, she kept TLR going, leading it to become one of the most influential literary magazines of the 1910s & 1920s, publishing, among others, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway.
TLR became most famous after it began serializing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1918. (Check out the digital versions of the actual issue at the Modernist Journals Project) Issues were seized and burned by the U.S. Post Office, and Anderson and her co-editor were convicted for obscenity, and fined $100 each.
Although she moved the magazine to New York in 1917, (and later to France), it all began in Chicago. Owing to that, Anderson was inducted into The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2014 and her influence on the literary scene cannot be overstated.
The copy of The Little Review Anthology pictured here is my personal copy. I found it sitting in the free bin at a San Diego library. Only later did I realize it was signed by Anderson herself, and there’s pencil in the upper corner of the page listing it as part of a three volume set for sale at $1250.00. That’s why it’s always worth looking in the free bin!
