As a very young woman, Margaret Anderson decided that her life was to be "Beautiful as no life had ever been." Her personal search for that beauty was eventually to take her to Paris in the twenties, but even before that she had become the friend and publisher of many of the leading writers, artists, and intellectuals of her time both in Europe and America. She defied convention throughout her life, armed with the knowledge that "the great thing to learn about life is first, not to do what you don't want to do, and second, to do what you do want to do."

In college she studied piano though she much preferred listening to performing. She read indiscriminately such writers as Ellen Key, Havelock Ellis, Dostoevski, Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne. After three years, she returned to her parents' prosperous home in Columbus, Indiana, and planned "how to...