The Little Review, December 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 9)

December 1915. The Great War shatters Europe while in Chicago, Margaret C. Anderson's The Little Review assembles a defiant portrait of modern consciousness. This issue pulses with the energy of writers grasping toward new forms: experimental poetry, short fiction that fractures narrative convention, and essays wrestling with art's purpose amid civilization's collapse. The contributors remain largely anonymous here, but their voices speak to a generation caught between the old world and whatever comes next. Anderson's editorial vision transforms this magazine into more than a publication; it becomes a proving ground for the modernist experiment, a space where traditional boundaries between poetry and prose, high art and social commentary dissolve. The war's shadow falls across these pages, but so does a fierce belief in literature's capacity to make meaning from chaos. For readers interested in the birth of literary modernism, in the moment when American writers began to find their own voice distinct from European traditions, this issue offers a vivid snapshot: uncertain, ambitious, unapologetically strange.