A new book unearths the influence of Margaret C. Anderson, early champion of literary greats

Writer Adam Morgan knew nothing about Margaret C. Anderson when he “bumped into her ghost by accident” along a shadowy corridor on the ninth floor of downtown’s Fine Arts Building in 2008.

There — in the building where Frank Lloyd Wright and William Wallace Denslow, the original illustrator for “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” books, had studios — was a small plaque dedicated to a woman that history has largely forgotten.

But, as Morgan would discover during research for his new book, Anderson was a woman whose iron will, rebellious streak and ability to spot genius where others saw only nauseating filth, helped change the way Chicago and the world sees literature today.

“She knew that great art required taking big risks, which is easily forgotten today in the era of corporate … publishing. She did not care what anyone thought about her writing or the things she was publishing,” said Morgan, author of the recently released “A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and The Fight to Modernize Literature” (Simon & Schuster; $29).

Morgan spent 10 years in Chicago, where he founded the “Chicago Review of Books” and became fascinated by Anderson, founder of the literary and arts magazine, “The Little Review,” first published in 1914.

“She was a queer woman who was often dismissed, particularly by male scholars and critics, as being this flighty society woman because she was also staggeringly beautiful,” said Morgan, who now lives in North Carolina.

Anderson’s genius was in finding the promise in “fringe, bohemian weirdos that nobody else wanted to publish at the time,” Morgan said.

In Anderson’s magazine, American readers were introduced — often at considerable risk to herself — to the likes of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and the great Irish modernist James Joyce. Anderson also wrote about her admiration for feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman, described at the time as “the most dangerous woman in America.” Goldman would later be charged and convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917, resulting in a two-year prison sentence.

Morgan reconstructs the story of how Anderson escaped to Chicago after a suffocating upbringing in a suburb of Indianapolis. Chicago was a young city unfettered by an old-world mindset but with a luminous cultural landscape of the recently built Art Institute of Chicago, Orchestra Hall, Field Museum and the Newberry Library.

Constantly in need of cash to keep her struggling magazine afloat, Anderson wasn’t averse to dangling her charms, even though she had no interest in the men who succumbed to them, Morgan writes.

In a time when homosexuality was illegal across the United States, Anderson never let the very real threat of prison douse her romantic impulses, having affairs with the American writer Solita Solano, opera singer and actress Georgette Leblanc and Dorothy Caruso, the widow of Italian opera star Enrico Caruso, among others.

Morgan portrays Anderson as a woman with an unwavering loyalty to the writers she championed, in particular Joyce. When she first read “Ulysses,” Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, she was determined to publish it in serial form, uncensored.

“This is the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have,” Anderson told Jane Heap, her one-time lover and collaborator at “The Little Review.” “We’ll print it if it’s the last effort of our lives.”

Anderson was true to her word, but America was not ready for Joyce’s prose, which Morgan quotes liberally: “Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright.”

Anderson was charged with violating the Comstock Act, a set of federal anti-obscenity laws. In court, she was accused of publishing “scenes of lewdness and of obscenity” in her “disgusting magazine.”

She was found guilty and fined $50.

The verdict left Anderson disheartened. Worse was to come, when “Ulysses,” having been mocked stateside, was published to great acclaim in Paris. Anderson’s hope was that art and literature — “Ulysses,” specifically — would change the way America saw the world and itself. For all her effort, she felt she’d failed.

“She became very disillusioned with that, including the fact that she felt like those grenades blew everything up but didn’t replace what was there with anything else,” Morgan said.

Anderson spent much of the rest of her life living in France, still chasing the beautiful life but having given up publishing.

“In her youth, she was the tip of this experimental, countercultural spear,” Morgan said. “As an old woman, looking at the counterculture of the 1960s, say, she finds the young people of that era obnoxious and weird, and thinks their art is terrible.”

That shouldn’t detract from her legacy, Morgan said. “Without her, I don’t think we would have literary modernism as we know it today. I don’t think we would have ‘Ulysses’ as we know it today. … Or Chicago,” Morgan said, pointing out that everyone else had rejected the novel until Anderson took a chance with the work.

Anderson died in 1973, at 86, in a hospital in southeast France.