The Little Review, November 1916 (vol. 3, No. 7)

November 1916: The Great War grinds on, and The Little Review throws its weight against cultural isolation. This issue pulses with the avant-garde's defiant energy: Richard Aldington's sensual Hellenic lyrics invoke gods and mortality, while Stefan Brazier's Prison Sketches render confinement in stark, harrowing images. Jean de Bosschère contributes a French dramatic poem staging a tense dialogue between a misanthrope, Plebs, and Solitude on faith and purity. Ezra Pound rails against U.S. tariffs on foreign books, arguing that protectionism breeds cultural mediocrity. The editors dismiss George Moore's The Brook Kerith with sharp contempt and champion Nexø's Pelle the Conqueror as art that humanizes labor. An eyewitness vignette places pianist Paderewski and poet Tagore in the same afternoon, a moment of unexpected convergence. The magazine admits financial peril but vows to persist. Throughout, 'The Reader Critic' section erupts in fiery debates about art versus life, while a Berlin dispatch on Marsden Hartley bridges American and European modernism. For anyone curious about the era that invented literary modernism, this is a time capsule crackling with argument, aesthetic passion, and precarity.