Anyway, I hadn’t heard about Addams before, and it’s always nice to learn about women like her.

Margaret Anderson and lover/publishing partner Jane Heap, shook the literary and arts worlds of the young 20th Century with the celebrated avant-garde magazine “The Little Review”.

The Little Review was the day’s leading journal of experimental literature and art, which introduced the now time-tested work of Hart Crane, Marcel Duchamp, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, W.B. Yeats, and many others. Boldly proclaiming its ambition through the motto, “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste”, Anderson’s journal embraced the dramatic transformations in the arts in those days with a no-surrender attitude and groundbreaking breadth of coverage—ultimately representing 23 schools of art from 19 countries. No other periodical has had such impact.

The Little Review is perhaps best known for its serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses from 1918 to 1920 and the unintentionally comic commotion resulting from the knee-jerk reaction of the government. Long story short, Ulysses includes a vignette on a subtle yet productive fantasy enjoyed by the protagonist while observing the provocative behavior of an attractive young woman. The US Post Office responded to the publication ham-fistedly, by confiscating and torching multiple issues it declared “obscene”. The “Society for the Suppression of Vice” filed charges and in 1921 Anderson and Heap were convicted and fined $50 each. Most of Europe and the UK followed with censorship in lockstep, like little lemmings, and the whole mess didn’t get sorted out until 1933, when a US District Judge in Manhattan issued a precedent-setting ruling in that the work was “not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene”, leaving the United States to become the first English-speaking country to actually publish Ulysses in book form. You can’t make this stuff up.

Anderson and Heap were quite the pair and lived large. They traveled in artistic circles extensively, moving from Chicago, to San Francisco, to New York (certainly their most productive period) and onto Paris. They fully embraced the Lesbian artistic community, working with writers such as Amy Lowell and Djuna Barnes in Greenwich Village and Gertrude Stein in Paris. William Carlos Williams commented on them in his biography, “Visiting Margaret Anderson’s and Jane Heap’s (16th Street) apartment—with its great bed hanging from four chains from the ceiling—was an experience; Jane Heap looked like a heavy-set Eskimo, but Margaret, always more than a little upstage, was an avowed beauty in the grand style.

Finally, it is appropriate to mention here the modernist, gay poet and rolling contributor to The Little Review, Hart Crane, who lived fast and died young—and who fell on hard times in 1917. Crane gratefully moved upstairs from Anderson and Heap,while he created some of his most remarkable poetry.