Margaret C. Anderson founded The Little Review in Chicago as an avant-garde magazine that aimed to promote new art and new kinds of criticism. From the start it positioned itself as a space for experimental writing and debate, setting up the editorial identity that later made it a major home for literary modernism.
Ezra Pound joined the magazine as its foreign editor and helped connect it more strongly to European modernist networks. His role broadened the magazine’s reach and made it more likely to publish major experimental work from outside the United States—including James Joyce.
The Little Review began serializing Joyce’s Ulysses in its March 1918 issue, starting with the episode “Telemachus.” Printing the novel in installments made a difficult new work available to readers before it could appear as a book, and it immediately tied the magazine’s reputation to Joyce’s emerging masterpiece.
As Ulysses episodes continued, U.S. postal authorities began suppressing some installments as obscene, making distribution risky and uneven. This early interference signaled that the fight over Joyce’s language and sexual candor would be legal as well as literary.
Through 1919, the magazine printed additional episodes such as “Lestrygonians,” “Scylla and Charybdis,” “Wandering Rocks,” and “Sirens.” This steady publication helped build an English-language audience for Joyce’s experimental style while keeping the magazine at the center of transatlantic modernism.
In late 1919 and early 1920, Ulysses installments from “Cyclops” were among those that attracted further postal suppression. The repeated seizures made clear that the magazine’s ability to serialize the novel depended on surviving a tightening censorship environment.
The April 1920 issue printed the “Nausicaa” episode, which includes a scene that authorities interpreted as sexual self-stimulation. This installment became the focal point for later legal action, narrowing a broad debate about modern literature into a court fight over a specific passage.
Under mounting legal pressure, The Little Review published only a portion of “Oxen of the Sun” as the last Ulysses material it would print. Ending the serialization meant the magazine could no longer serve as the primary public outlet for Joyce’s unfinished novel in the United States.
After the “Nausicaa” installment circulated, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice became involved and moved toward prosecution. The case shifted from informal censorship (like seized mail) to formal criminal charges aimed at the magazine’s editors.
The obscenity trial of editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap began on February 14, 1921, in New York’s Court of Special Sessions. The court treated the case as a close reading of the “Nausicaa” text, testing whether modernist literary technique could be understood—or defended—within early 20th-century obscenity law.
On February 21, 1921, the court convicted Anderson and Heap and fined them $50 each, ordering them not to publish further installments of Ulysses. The decision effectively blocked the novel’s legal publication in the United States at the time and marked a major public setback for modernist publishing through little magazines.
After the conviction, The Little Review removed or softened some of its most provocative public posture, while Joyce’s route to publication shifted abroad. With U.S. serialization halted, the novel’s future depended on non-U.S. publishing channels, showing how legal pressure could redirect where and how modernist literature reached readers.
The Little Review and the serialisation, trial, and reception of Ulysses (1914-1921)