I don’t remember having explained to anyone that the Little Review couldn’t pay for contributions. It was quite taken for granted that since there was no money there would be no talk of renumeration. No one ever asked me why I didn’t pay, no one ever made me feel that I was robbing the poor artist. It was nine years later in Paris that Gertrude Stein told me I couldn’t hope to do such a thing in Europe. Her tone was almost reproachful, although she had always offered her manuscripts to the Little Review with the same high disregard of payment that characterized all our contributors. She merely didn’t consider it good principle. Well, neither do I consider it good principle for the artist to remain unpaid—it’s a little better than for him to remain unprinted, that’s all. Practically everything the Little Review published during its first years was material that would have been accepted by no other magazine in the world at the moment. Later all the art magazines wanted to print our contributors and, besides, pay them. The contributors took the same stand as Sherwood Anderson. If they had something we especially wanted they gave it to us before the Dial was permitted to see it—and pay. The best European writers and painters did the same. I can’t help feeling that Gertrude Stein is wrong. I believe that a little review can exist in any country, at any time—not only “before the war.” I believe that an analogous thing exists always, somewhere; exists in any epoch of an upheaval in the arts and exists by the same dispensations.

—from My Thirty Years’ War, the first of Margaret Anderson’s three-part autobiography