After leaving Elyria following a mild breakdown, he returned to Chicago and copywriting, and soon after separated from his wife (they were divorced in 1916, at which time Anderson married Tennessee Mitchell, an aspiring Chicago artist). He turned, too, to serious writing, establishing himself as a member of the modernist literary movement known as the Chicago Renaissance. With a trunkful of manuscripts brought with him from Elyria, where he had been working in isolation, he began thinking about his new identity as a writer, at the same time rewriting old material and seeking out new subject matter and new approaches to it.
Anderson's first literary publication was in the first issue of the Little Review, which appeared in March 1914. Edited by Margaret Anderson, the journal was to become the voice of the Chicago Renaissance. Anderson's contribution was an essay called "The New Note," essentially an attempt to define what he had learned about writing in the nine months since he had returned to Chicago. The essay was neither a definition of modernism nor a plea for artistic liberation, however; it was an affirmation of the work he had begun and a statement of the sense of craft that was to dominate his work to the end of his life and career twenty-seven years later.
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