The Little Review, May 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 3)

May 1915. The Great War enters its second year, and a small Chicago magazine carries voices that will reshape literature itself. The Little Review, just a year old, already operates as a laboratory for literary modernism: poetry that breaks from Victorian formality, essays that interrogate the war's madness, and fiction that refuses conventional structure. This issue captures a profession in revolution, writers testing new forms to express a world that has torn itself apart. Margaret Anderson's editorial vision champions the strange, the difficult, the genuinely new. Here are the voices that would become canonical, still hungry, still fighting for space in a culture that hadn't yet made room for them. The magazine's significance lies not in any single piece but in its cumulative argument: that literature must change because the world has changed, and that America needs its own avant-garde, untethered from European traditions. For readers drawn to the origins of modernist literature, this issue offers a window into the moment when everything was being questioned and rebuilt.