A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature

by Adam Morgan

The definitive biography of overlooked queer icon Margaret C. Anderson, whose fight to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses led to her arrest and trial for obscenity. Perfect for fans of The Editor and The Book-Makers.

Already under fire for publishing the literary avant-garde into a world not ready for it, Margaret C. Anderson’s cutting-edge magazine The Little Review was a bastion of progressive politics and boundary-pushing writing from then-unknowns like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and Djuna Barnes. And as its publisher, Anderson was a target. From Chicago to New York and Paris, this fearless agitator helmed a woman-led publication that pushed American culture forward and challenged the sensibilities of early twentieth century Americans dismayed by its salacious writing and advocacy for supposed extremism like women’s suffrage, access to birth control, and LBGTQ rights.

But then it went too far. In 1921, Anderson found herself on trial and labeled “a danger to the minds of young girls” by a government seeking to shut her down. Guilty of having serialized James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses in her magazine, Anderson was now not just a publisher but also a scapegoat for regressives seeking to impose their will on a world on the brink of modernization.

Author, journalist, and literary critic Adam Morgan brings Anderson and her journal to life anew in A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, capturing a moment of cultural acceleration and backlash all too familiar today while shining light on an unsung heroine of American arts and letters. Bringing a fresh eye to a woman and a movement misunderstood in their time, this biography highlights a feminist counterculture that audaciously pushed for more during a time of extreme social conservatism and changed the face of American literature and culture forever.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, LGBT, Biography Memoir, Books About Books, Audiobook

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 9, 2025

About the author

Adam Morgan is a culture journalist and critic who lives near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Esquire, WIRED, Scientific American, Inverse, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature (December 9, 2025 from Simon & Schuster).

Adam is represented by Natalie Edwards at Trellis Literary Management. He is also the founding editor of the Chicago Review of Books, the Southern Review of Books, and the Chicago Literary Archive.

Reviews

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cat murder. Sleeping judges. Great Lake camping. A cult leader. More evictions than you can shake a stick at.

These are just a sampling of some of the wild aspects of Adam Morgan's superlative A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls. The book was certainly a danger to my free time because I knocked this one out in two sittings. Morgan nailed it.

I love my history to give me the full story. Not a hero's story, but a human story which shows warts and all. Morgan's book tells the story of Margaret C. Anderson who was a delight to read about, but I probably wouldn't have been a huge fan of her in real life. However, we are all deeply indebted to her assault on censorship using her magazine The Little Review in the early 1920s. She was complex and deserved having her whole story told.

Morgan follows Anderson's life and it quite frankly needed no embellishment even if Anderson herself is caught quite a few times doing just that in her memoirs. It's these little details that Morgan homes in on which make the book such a fun jaunt. I was completely unfamiliar with Anderson, but I was aware of the efforts in the U.S. and U.K. to censor James Joyce's Ulysses when it was first created. I didn't realize that Anderson was the point of the spear in bringing the highly controversial novel to the public in a serialized form.

Anderson isn't the only character who jumps off the page. Ezra Pound is another person who gets his time to shine, even if he is the second worst person in the entire book. I'll let the reader find the worst one. Joyce is also here along with Anderson's many love interests throughout her life. As if putting Ulysses out when decency laws were at their most stringent wasn't enough, Anderson was also a lesbian when that was also not mainstream.

Morgan's prose is pitch perfect throughout. He knows when to make a quip, when to point out that his characters are being misleading or hypocritical, and when to sit back and let the story happen. Anderson's court debacle is one of the most unintentionally hilarious things I have read in years. All of these ingredients make for rich and full fleshed out characters. As I said, there are many people in this book who might not be saints, but they are damn fun to read about.

(This book was provided as a review copy by Atria Books.)

[queenofassassin · Rating 5 out of 5]

For someone who didn’t have much knowledge about Margaret C. Anderson or the history of book bans in America, this has a lot to offer. It’s easy to read and hard to put down. I absolutely love reading about all these people and the history 😍

This book isn’t just about Margaret C. Anderson; there are many other famous figures featured as well. It offers a more in-depth insight into what was happening in early 20th-century America and publishing.

Margaret C. Anderson was advocating for many things, including LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and birth control. A lot has changed, but much of history seems to be repeating itself.

I’d recommend this to sooo many people. Especially anyone feeling that female rage. It’s good to look back at history and see what’s been done before. It would benefit everyone to read more about history, as it helps prevent the same mistakes from happening again.

[ritareadthat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was utterly captivating and completely took me off guard. The narrative was engaging and not dry like some biographies I have read. The lives of this woman and her lovers, the literary world—so scandalous! She interacted regularly with James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and so many more. If you want an in depth look into the literary world of Chicago, New York and Paris from the 1910s-1930s, this is the book for you.

[Biblio Files (takingadayoff) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maragaret C. Anderson's claim to fame is as editor of The Little Review, a literary magazine. As a publisher of modernist works of such writers as Ezra Pound and James Joyce, she and her business and domestic partner, Jane Heap, were often accused of distributing pornography. They managed to stay out of court until Margaret pulled a marketing stunt that forced the issue. She sent the magazine, unsolicited, to dozens of wealthy households, hoping to get new subscribers. Instead, the excerpts from James Joyce's Ulysses shocked some of the people who read it and the U.S. Post Office was forced to take the magazine to court.

The first half of the book takes us up to and through the riveting trial. In the second half, this is more of a group biography of the Paris circle that Margaret joined. She ceded control of The Little Review to Jane and became an expat, living a life of leisure with artists, musicians, and writers. It's all very decadent and atmospheric. It's great to get a look at the Lost Generation from the women's point of view.

Thanks to Edelweiss and Simon & Schuster for a digital review copy.

[Jenn · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The definitive biography of overlooked queer icon Margaret C. Anderson, whose fight to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses led to her arrest and trial for obscenity."

The above is from the GR description of the books. That sounded like a book I wanted to read. Keep in mind, I'm not a huge fan of NF, but I've been trying to work more into my reading this year. So, this might just be a case of "slightly wrong audience."

What this actually felt like is a long list of haphazard decisions made my a woman who just happened to be a lesbian. This just felt like an unneeded chronicle of Anderson's movements all through her life. There was plenty of name-checking here, but only about 1/3 of them I recognized and mostly those are just repeated over and over. From the description, this sounded like it was about a queer woman who was a champion for banned books and very actively did something about it. What it read like was a long buildup to the Ulysses incident, maybe a chapter about it, then the rest were Anderson's moves across the pond and back with different people, never seeming to really do much ever again. 🤷‍♀️

Sorry, not sorry.

[haley ⊹ · Rating 3 out of 5]

kinda skimmed the end a bit ngl. margaret is awesome and it was cool to learn about her, but the writing style of this was very dry. I can tell that a lot of research was put into the book though which is great but. yeah

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take a shot every time Margaret gets a free piano

[Lulu]

Adam Morgan's "A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls" is a fascinating and timely biography of Margaret C. Anderson, the bold publisher who first brought Ulysses to America and helped shape modern literature. Morgan paints a vivid picture of Anderson’s life in early 20th-century America as a queer woman, editor, and cultural rebel who fought censorship and championed writers who would later become legends. Her politically progressive magazine, "The Little Review," broke boundaries, challenged the cultural and societal norms of the time, and enraged critics for its daring ideas about art, gender, and freedom. Morgan’s writing skillfully makes history feel urgent and alive, showing how Anderson’s courage and defiance still resonate in today’s fights over creativity and expression.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This showed up on my doorstep one morning and I originally thought it was a Goodreads Giveaway win but after checking my GR account it doesn't look like I won it....which makes me think Simon & Schuster sent it to me specifically as a [semi-known?] intellectual freedom/anti-censorship librarian who guest lectured at [American] Heidelberg University's John Quinn series on banned books a couple years back. Okay, S&S, but you're gonna hate it:

I found that the first half of my paperback advanced reader copy was more readable than the second half though the information presented was all pretty much new to me, so it was cool to learn so many new things about a topic that I love.

I have never read Ulysses myself though it IS sitting on my bookshelf because I feel like I could read it at some point (F you, I finished Infinite Jest and read all the footnotes 100%). My buddy who HAS read and loved Ulysses had this to say about this whole story: "Little girls were gonna be like, 'Wow, [Joyce] did a great job mocking the floral language of Enlightenment writing and now I am totally going to underappreciate work from that era..." And I love that commentary because that's appears to essentially be what happened, at least from Margaret's complaints about the quality of American literature in the latter half of the twentieth century. I'm sure she would love that 45% of twenty-first century writers use assistive AI.

Because of who I am as a person, I am now wondering if a book was totally and completely written by generative AI, can that generative AI be arrested for violating the obscenity law? I can't wait for that iteration of the culture / censorship wars. I would pay to see Moms for Liberty beating up computers, I really would.

Also, author, do you actually share the same name as the fun, cool neighborhood in Washington DC or.....?

[Melisende · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a decent rather than definitive biography of a woman, who happened to be a lesbian, who ran her own publishing company, who employ other women, and who took on the "established" publishing world by serialising Joyce's "Ulyssses" much to the chagrin of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. It would be for this alone, that Margaret would be demonised and arrested for obscenity - resulting in her standing trial in 1921 with co-publisher, Jane Heap.

Morgan's book takes us through Margaret's earlier life - childhood, her self-emancipation from her parents, her work in non-traditional roles, including reviewing books, before establishing her own publishing company - and all the trials and errors associated with each decision and action.

Then the obscenity trial is covered - rather too briefly for my liking - before we travel with Margaret out of the USA and onto Continental Europe where her life is a little sketchy at best. Powering through the 1930s in rather jumbled narrative - quite possibly due to the number of people introduced and the required explanations as to their associations / connections - we jump to the final years of Margaret's life.

For a woman at the forefront of a major publishing controversy, I felt there were times when this fell a little flat. Whether this was due to a lack of sources or access to sources, I cannot tell but I was looking for slightly more than a wikipedia entry, especially with regards to the trial component.

Look, overall, it is a great introduction to a woman whose lasting legacy was the promotion of "serious literature" in an era and to a society marked by conservative moral and literary tastes.

[Patrycja · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an unexpectedly captivating read. I didn’t anticipate being so drawn in by this book, but Adam Morgan has crafted a narrative that feels as immersive as a novel while remaining deeply grounded in historical fact. “A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls” explores the remarkable life of Margaret C. Anderson — editor, cultural provocateur, and founder of “The Little Review” — through a lens that is both scholarly and profoundly human.

The book unfolds in elegant, well-structured chapters tracing Anderson’s path from her Midwestern beginnings to the intellectual hubs of Chicago, New York, and Paris. Morgan brings her world to life with vivid detail — her passion for literature, her defiance of convention, and her relentless pursuit of artistic freedom. Beyond her editorial work, the author illuminates Anderson’s personal convictions: her advocacy for LGBTQ rights, women’s autonomy, and access to birth control — ideas that branded her an anarchist and radical in her time.

What makes this book so striking is its contemporary resonance. The struggles Anderson faced — censorship, moral panic, and the policing of art — mirror the cultural battles we continue to fight today. Morgan’s portrait of Anderson is not only a study of one woman’s courage but also a reflection on the enduring necessity of challenging boundaries.
A thoughtful, engaging, and timely work — and, for me, an unexpectedly inspiring read.
Highly recommended — a must-read for anyone who cares about art, freedom, and fearless women.

[Carol Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's crucial to note the current political climate during releases, so here it goes: this book has 26 pages of citations! How beautiful! How demure! How very much following the guidelines of what analysis means. (If you don't get my meaning, Google what's happening in Oklahoma.) I love how Morgan used Margaret C. Anderson's own memoirs as a springboard, but wasn't afraid to correct the memoir's interpretation of the 1900s with facts. It's great to see that even literary titans aren't infallible. There's a heavy emphasis on Anderson's connections with other artists, turning this book into a bit of a mind map web. The drama also steadily builds in the same way it did in real life, with a steady stubbornness in Anderson's childhood that gradually builds into a full-blown riot. I wish Adam Morgan would come out from behind the curtain a little bit more--I don't mind hearing an author's thoughts when they're witty and clever--but overall, a great picture of the life and founder of The Little Review.

[Greg Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the founder of the Chicago Review of Books, this is a biography of a woman named Margaret Anderson who started a magazine called The Little Review in Chicago in the 1910s — a time of literary renaissance in Chicago.

Later, after moving to Greenwich Village in New York City, Anderson is famous for serializing James Joyce’s Ulysses — and standing trial for obscenity, as a result. There’s a really funny scene during the trial when the judge refuses to let the offending passages be read in court because he thinks he’s protecting the virtue of the women in court, including Margaret — who is the one fighting to be able to continue publishing said “obscene” passages in the first place. Then as now, book banning isn’t exactly a logical pursuit.

Lots of fun name drops in this book, from Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway to Harold Ross and Jane Grant (the founders of the New Yorker). If you’re interested in some good early 20th century history and the story of a woman who took no bullshit, this is a great read.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid biography

A solid biography, the author well captured the tone and life of Anderson. It did seem like there was not much to say once she landed overseas, and her being taken in by a flim-flam man was somewhat disappointing. Also, the last 30 years are barely touched on but I suppose that's by design. I did wonder how Anderson managed to fund her life (discussed with detail early on but less so over time). It was also difficult to keep count of who was sleeping with whom... One aspect to completely commend the author on is being able to publish a book on these various topics in 2025 without all of the usual hand-wringing, self-flagellation of our times vs the past, and allowing the events to speak for themselves without the requisite id-pol commentary that the vast majority of his fellow authors are seemingly incapable of omitting at present. It made for a pleasant and eye-roll free read!

[ELVIA P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls is a compelling and meticulously researched biography that restores Margaret C. Anderson to her rightful place in literary and cultural history. Adam Morgan brings clarity and urgency to Anderson’s life and work, illuminating the extraordinary risks she took to defend artistic freedom, modernist literature, and progressive ideals in an era defined by repression and fear of change.

What makes this book especially resonant is how vividly it connects the past to the present. Anderson’s prosecution for publishing Ulysses is not treated as a distant historical event, but as part of an ongoing struggle over who controls culture, morality, and expression. Morgan’s narrative is both scholarly and accessible, offering sharp insight into censorship, feminism, queer history, and the cost of dissent. This is an essential read for anyone interested in literature, free speech, and the women who reshaped modern culture against overwhelming odds.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't know anything about Margaret C. Anderson but certainly know more after reading this biography about her status both as a lover of literature and queer icon who rabbleroused with the best of them from creating an art critic magazine without paying contributors in order to elevate all types of art to being accused of corrupting young girls with the publication of literature, she did the things that made her happy, caroused with those that elevated her, and lived a life she wanted and in the 1920s on through, that meant a lot of rule breaking and knowing others who broke rules including tried-and-true anarchists like Emma Goldman. I wasn't riveted by the content, but it was a worthy read.

[Toriii · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Morgan's biography about Margaret Anderson , "A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls," really got me thinking. It prompted reflections on my stance regarding book bans and literature filters in today's society. As someone who enjoys romance and a bit of smut, yet identifies as conservative, this book challenged me with some difficult questions. The narrative of Margaret Anderson, her lovers, publications, and various escapades was highly entertaining. Morgan's writing stood out; I could sense his tone and sarcasm, coupled with genuine admiration for Margaret Anderson as an iconic historical figure. Overall, it was a great read; though it felt a bit dry towards the end, I remained engaged throughout.

Future Readers: Take shot every time she gets a new apartment or piano. 🤣

[Chelsea (gofetchabook) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this one and was really excited to read it, but it fell incredibly flat for me.

All of the information in there felt like it was taken from a wikipedia article. There was also a lot of name dropping of people that Margaret knew or had met in her life. It was just too much.

I expected this to be much more about the trial, but that was really only a small part of it.

Overall, I thought the way it was done was just odd. It didn't really hold my attention, and I kept waiting for something more that never came.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was in college I took a class on American Expatriates in Paris with one of my best friends (z''l), in which we learned all about the Little Review and its publication of Ulysses. What a treat it was, then, to revisit the Little Review and its editor, Margaret Anderson in detail. I was always going to adore this book but I think I would have loved it even without knowing the background: Anderson led a fascinating life and Morgan does a great job describing it. Highly recommended, if only Tammi were still here to read it with me!

[Michael reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls is a riveting biography of Margaret C. Anderson, the fearless woman behind The Little Review who helped usher modern literature into existence. Adam Morgan brings to life a moment when publishing Joyce, fighting for women’s rights, and challenging censorship meant standing trial for it. Powerful, timely, and deeply relevant to today’s cultural battles.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid read. It's a very straightforward biography, which I like, but could have been a bit more powerful with some more words devoted to the direct impact of Anderson's work to fight censorship. Also there were so many names toward the end, I got a little lost. Overall I liked it just fine, and appreciated how the author talks about Anderson in a very real way, the good and the bad.

[Kidlitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superlative biography of a woman I'm ashamed to know so little about but so glad to have discovered thanks to Morgan's work. How many stupid decisions have been made to supposedly protect women's minds by the patriarchy, and Margaret C. Anderson was wise to the dangers of censorship and misogyny disguised as protective benevolence.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very long drawn out story where not a lot happened. Yes I understand this is a biography but parts could have been summarized. From the book description I was expecting more about a woman who did something about book banning and that’s not really what it was.

[Carolyn Hawkins-Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so intrigued to read this book. I knew it was nonfiction but it was mostly compilations of other articles and information and not any newfound data.

The audiobook narrator is the only saving grace.

It was underwhelming and disappointing.

[E]

Just won this book through the Goodreads giveaway page- thanks for selecting me

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[C.M. Stenquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

informative and interesting

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

We were hooked from the first page, the writing is honest and real.

[Airakey Hieraarchy]

jkh

[Sara Weather · Rating 3 out of 5]

#17:rtc