Background

Margaret Caroline Anderson was born on November 24, 1886 in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, the first of three daughters of Arthur Aubrey Anderson, a railroad executive, and Jesse Shortridge.

Margaret and her two sisters grew up in Columbus, Indiana, where Margaret developed a strong sense of independence, a thirst for beauty, and a complete disdain for the "higher joys of country clubs and bridge. "

Education

In 1903, Anderson enrolled at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where, for the next three years, she studied piano.

Career

In 1906, Anderson began a campaign to convince her parents to allow her to move to Chicago, a city then undergoing a renaissance in theater, music, and the arts. Arriving in Chicago with her sister Lois in the fall of 1908, Anderson began conducting interviews and writing book reviews for the Interior (later the Continent), a religious magazine edited by Clara E. Laughlin. She also reviewed for Francis Hackett at the Chicago Evening Post.

After losing her allowance because of her extravagant spending habits, she found a clerical position in Browne's Bookstore at eight dollars per week. Browne's, located in the Fine Arts Building, was connected with the Dial, a literary review edited by Francis F. Browne. Recognizing Anderson's talent, Browne placed her on the magazine's staff. Anderson enjoyed her work as literary editor at the Dial, but continuing in her position became uncomfortable after Browne made an unwelcome advance towards her.

Fortuitously, in the summer of 1913, Clara Laughlin suddenly resigned as editor of the Continent; Anderson readily agreed to fill her mentor's shoes. Anderson did well in Chicago both professionally and socially. Through Floyd Dell, Hackett's successor at the Chicago Evening Post, she met Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and other leading figures of the Chicago Renaissance. It was at one of Dell's parties that she announced her intention to publish the Little Review. The idea struck her as a cure for depression. She was depressed, she realized, because her life was uninspired. Her solution was to publish a magazine filled with the best conversation the world had to offer. Anderson found several financial supporters, including Eunice Tietjens and DeWitt Wing.

Following Wing's advice, she went to New York to solicit publishers' advertisements. She returned to Chicago and in March 1914 launched the Little Review, "A Magazine of the Arts, Making No Compromise with the Public Taste. " The inaugural issue included Vachel Lindsay's poem "How a Little Girl Danced, " articles on Nietzsche and Gertrude Stein, and Anderson's own essay on Jan Paderewski. It was an auspicious beginning.

Anderson, however, soon encountered trouble, when an editorial celebrating anarchism in the May issue cost her Wing's support. Fiercely independent, she continued publishing even though her lack of finances forced her, along with her sister Lois and a Little Review staff member, to pitch a tent on the shores of Lake Michigan, where they lived rent-free from May through November.

In 1916, Anderson met Jane Heap, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute and the daughter of a midwestern psychiatrist. Heap, the most interesting conversationalist Anderson had ever known, joined the staff of the Little Review and lived and worked closely with Anderson for the next eight years. They briefly moved to Muir Woods, California, where they published the September 1916 issue, famous for its "want ad"--twelve blank pages expressing the editors' dismay with the lack of "real art" being offered them. The paucity of suitable material, however, was short-lived. Upon returning to Chicago, Anderson received the first of many letters from Ezra Pound.

After the Little Review moved to New York in 1917, Pound became its foreign editor. Under his auspices, the Little Review was to receive contributions from such modern literary giants as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. In the March 1918 issue, Anderson began the serialization of Joyce's Ulysses, the deed on which the Little Review's reputation would forever rest. During the three years Joyce's novel ran, issues would be seized by the United States Post Office, declared obscene, and burned in four separate incidents.

In October 1920, the Society for the Suppression of Vice prosecuted the Little Review after the Washington Square Bookshop in New York sold a copy of the July-August issue--containing Joyce's Nausicaa episode--to a minor. In December of that year, the editors were placed on trial. They were represented by noted Tammany Hall lawyer and patron of the arts, John Quinn. Quinn lost the case, and on February 21, 1921, the editors were found guilty, fingerprinted, and fined $50 each. More important, they were enjoined from printing further excerpts of Ulysses. After the verdict, Anderson began to lose interest in the magazine, which became a quarterly in the fall. It then suspended publication between 1927 and the final issue in 1929.

In 1922, Anderson met Georgette Leblanc, the French singer and former lover of Maurice Maeterlinck. Leblanc soon replaced Heap in Anderson's affections. Around the same time, Anderson also met Alfred Richard Orage, who introduced her to the works of the mystic philosopher George I. Gurdjieff. Anderson, Heap, and Leblanc soon became Gurdjieff's loyal disciples. Leaving Jane Heap in charge of the Little Review, Anderson and Leblanc left for France in 1923. There they would share their lives together until Leblanc's death in 1941. They made plans for Leblanc to perform in concert with Anderson as her accompanist. At the last minute, however, Leblanc's backer withdrew, leaving the women stranded. They stayed first at Leblanc's sister's Château de Tancarville. Leblanc's relatives were wealthy, but they practiced a parsimony that made life at the château unpleasant. In 1924, and again in 1935, Anderson and Leblanc spent time studying with Gurdjieff at Fontainebleau-Avon. Although Anderson and Leblanc returned to the château when funds were low, they escaped to more congenial quarters whenever possible. Traveling in France from Paris to the Pyrenees, they stayed in small hotels, chalets, and even a lighthouse. They lived quietly, supporting themselves primarily on royalties from Anderson's My Thirty Years' War (1930) and Leblanc's Souvenirs (1932).

In June 1939, after Leblanc was diagnosed with cancer, Anderson and Leblanc fled Paris for the relative safety of Le Cannet in southern France, where they remained until Leblanc's death in 1941. Only then did Anderson agree to return home. In June 1942, with a $400 gift from Ernest Hemingway, Anderson bought a ticket for New York on the Drotingholm. On board ship she met Dorothy Caruso, the widow of Enrico Caruso, the famous tenor. They formed a fast friendship and lived together until Dorothy's death in 1955. During her years with Dorothy, Anderson compiled The Little Review Anthology (1953) and wrote the second volume of her autobiography, The Fiery Fountains (1951). In 1956, she returned to Le Cannet, where she lived and wrote in seclusion. Here she completed The Unknowable Gurdjieff (1962) and The Strange Necessity (1970), the final volume of her autobiography.

Achievements

• Anderson was a promiment author and editor. She was the founder of a literary magazine The Little Review, which introduced several prominent American and British writers of the 20th century, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in the United States. In 2014, Anderson was inducted into The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Forbidden Fires

    (An autobiographical novel, first published in 1958, about...)

  • The Strange Necessity

    (In this third volume of her autobiography the editor of t...)

  • The Unknowable Gurdjieff

    (Provides a first hand account of the teachings of George ...)

  • My Thirty Years' War; An Autobiography,

    (Book by Anderson, Margaret C.)

Views

Quotations: "I demand that life be inspired every moment. The only way to guarantee this is to have inspired conversation every moment. "

"I am no man's wife, no man's delightful mistress, and I will never, never, never be a mother. "

"I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it. .. I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines. .. I change everyone's coiffure--except those that please me--and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear. .. It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made. "

"People with heavy physical vibrations rule the world. "

"Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim--for self-development, or the discovery of cosmic truths--when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate. "

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "She was blond, shapely, with lean ankles and a Scandinavian face. . .. I forgave her her chastity because she was a genius. During the years I knew her she wore the same suit, a tailored affair in robin's egg blue. Despite this unvarying costume she was as chic as any of the girls who model today for the fashion magazines. . .. It was surprising to see a coiffure so neat on a noggin so stormy. " - Ben Hecht

Connections

Anderson never married, and although she never declared herself a lesbian, scholars have considered her in the company of lesbian writers.

Father:

Arthur Aubrey Anderson

Mother:

Jesse (Shortridge) Anderson

References

• Lesbian Images
• Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Notable American Women: The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary (Notable American Women) (Volume 4)