Ulysses in the Little Review
Margaret Anderson (1886–1973) founded the American literary magazine the Little Review in 1914. Her friend and partner Jane Heap (1883–1964) became the art editor, and Ezra Pound served as foreign editor. Together they helped shape a version of literary modernism, publishing writers such as Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, and Jean Toomer, one of the few Black writers included in their enterprise. When Margaret Anderson read the beginning of Ulysses in February 1918, she vowed to print it “if it’s the last effort of our lives.”
Berenice Abbott (1898–1991)
Margaret Anderson, ca. 1928, printed later
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Laura May Isaacson, 1976; 1976.601.1
Berenice Abbott (1898–1991)
Jane Heap, ca. 1928, printed later
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Laura May Isaacson, 1976; 1976.601.2
© Berenice Abbot via Getty Images
The Case Against "Nausicaa"
The first of twenty-three installments of Ulysses appeared in the Little Review in March 1918. Between 1919 and 1920, the US Postal Service confiscated four issues because they violated the Comstock Act, which prohibited the distribution by mail of printed matter deemed obscene. The issue containing an excerpt from the “Nausicaa” episode also provoked a court case against editors Anderson and Heap. In the offending passages, Leopold Bloom masturbates as he watches Gerty McDowell, a young woman who indulges him by leaning back and raising her skirt. Lawyer John Quinn’s defense—essentially, that Ulysses was not obscene since it was unintelligible to average readers—was a misfire. Anderson and Heap were fined, and the novel was banned in the United States.
Little Review 4 [i.e., 5], no. 11 (March 1918) [cover] and 7, no. 2 (July–August 1920) [the "Nausicaa" episode]
The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Annette De La Renta in Memory of Carter Burden, 2005; PML 129665
© The Estate of James Joyce.