[3] The periodical is most noted for introducing many prominent American and British writers of the 20th century, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, in the United States and publishing the first thirteen chapters of James Joyce's then-unpublished novel Ulysses.

[4][5][6] A large collection of Anderson's papers on Gurdjieff's teaching is preserved at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

[8] She graduated from high school in Anderson, Indiana, in 1903 and then entered a two-year junior preparatory class at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio.

[12][11]In 1916, Anderson met Jane Heap,[13] a spirited intellectual and artist immersed in Chicago's Arts and Crafts Movement and a former lover of the novelist Djuna Barnes.

Heap maintained a low profile, signing her contributions simply "JH", but she had a major impact on the success of the journal through its bold and radical content.

The magazine's most published poet was the New York dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, with whom Heap became friends on the basis of their shared confrontational feminist and artistic agendas.

[15] Other notable contributors included Sherwood Anderson, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Malcolm Cowley, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Francis Picabia, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Waley, and William Carlos Williams.

[18] Although the obscenity trial was ostensibly about Ulysses, Irene Gammel argues that The Little Review came under attack for its overall subversive tone and, in particular, its publication of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's sexually explicit poetry and outspoken defense of Joyce.

[19] During the trial in February 1921, hundreds of Greenwich Villagers, men and women, marched into Special Court Sessions;[20] the outcome was that Anderson and Heap were fined $100 each and fingerprinted.

[21][22] In early 1924, through Alfred Richard Orage, Anderson learned of the spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, and she saw performances of his "sacred dances", first at the Neighbourhood Playhouse and later at Carnegie Hall.

Shortly after Gurdjieff's automobile accident, Anderson, along with Georgette Leblanc, Jane Heap and Monique Surrere, moved to France to visit him at Fountainebleau-Avon, where he had set up his institute at Château du Prieuré in Avon.

Besides Anderson and Leblanc, these were Jane Heap, Elizabeth Gordon, Solita Solano, Kathryn Hulme, Louise Davidson and Alice Rohrer.

[29] Along with Katherine Mansfield and Jane Heap, she remains one of the most noted disciples at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, at Fontainebleau, near Paris, from October 1922 to 1924.