Margaret Anderson

Margaret Anderson, 1951

Margaret Caroline Frances Anderson (born November 24, 1886 in Indianapolis , Indiana , † October 19, 1973 in Cannes ) was an American writer ; Founder, editor and publisher of The Little Review - one of the most important avant-garde literature - magazines in the period between the world wars.

Life

Margaret Caroline Frances Anderson was the eldest of three daughters of Aubrey Arthur Anderson and his wife Jessie Shortridge. In 1903 she graduated from high school in Anderson , Indiana and then two years junior high school at the Western College for Women in Oxford , Ohio . In 1906, Anderson left college to pursue a career as a pianist . In the fall of 1908 she went to Chicago , where she worked as an editor for The Continent , a religious weekly magazine. She later worked for The Dial magazine before becoming a book critic for the Chicago Evening Post in 1913 .

In 1914 Margret Anderson founded the literary magazine The Little Review in New York City and brought out James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and in 1918 " Ulysses " in sequels . Four issues of the literary magazine Little Review were confiscated and burned by the United States Postal Service . 1920 was made Anderson the process for disseminating obscene writings and sentenced in 1921 to a fine of $ 100. It was thanks to Ezra Pound that the until then chaotically run small literary magazine got a profile and direction and promising authors from Europe - above all Joyce with his main work - as well as important American “expatriates” living in Paris could be won as employees. This circle included Hart Crane , TS Eliot , Ernest Hemingway , William Butler Yeats , Sherwood Anderson , André Breton , Jean Cocteau , Malcolm Cowley , Marcel Duchamp , Ford Madox Ford , Emma Goldman , Nicholas Vachel Lindsay , Amy Lowell , Francis Picabia , Carl Sandburg , Gertrude Stein , Wallace Stevens , Arthur Waley and William Carlos Williams .

“ While other early modern magazines proclaimed the literary revolution, your magazine was a commitment to anarchy. "

- Shari Benstock

In 1916, Anderson first met Jane Heap , a journalist for the Chicago Arts and Crafts Movement and former lover of the writer Djuna Barnes , in Chicago . In the early 1920s, the two women went to Paris together , where they continued to publish their magazine and smuggled it back to America, often on adventurous routes. Their love affair was already over, because Anderson had recently met her great love Georgette Leblanc , a French opera singer who had lived with the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck for a long time until he left her because of a younger woman. Margaret left Jane in charge of the Little Review and lived with Georgette in a harmonious and mutually beneficial relationship until her death in 1941.

In 1942 Anderson returned to the States; her next partner was Dorothy Caruso , the widow of tenor Enrico Caruso . After Dorothy's death in 1955, Margaret Anderson went back to France and continued to work on her autobiographical works. Margaret Anderson died in 1973 and was buried next to Georgette Leblanc in Cannes.

Primary literature

1913 The Dial 1932 My Thirty Years' War 1951 The Fiery Fountains

1962 The Strange Necessity 1962 The Unknowable Gurdjieff 1996 Forbidden Fires , posthumously

Secondary literature

• Naomi Sawelson-Gorse: Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity , (2001) ISBN 0-2626-9260-0
• Holly A. Baggett: Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds , New York University Press (2000)
• Paula R. Feldman: Margaret Anderson ”, American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939 , Dictionary of Literary Biography, Detroit (1980)

Web links

• Margaret Anderson. In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with references and citations).
• Answers.com - Margaret Anderson (English)
• Margaret Anderson Quotes (English)
• Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap . Portrait on lespress .com