Early History and Beat Poetry Censorship Controversy
Before censorship by the university administration, the Chicago Review was an early and leading promoter of the Beat Movement in American literature. In the autumn of 1958, it published an excerpt from Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which was judged obscene by the Chicago Daily News and sparked public outcry; this episode led to the censorship of the following issue, to which the editors responded by resigning and starting a new magazine in which to freely publish Beat fiction.
The Chicago Review became the subject of considerable controversy in 1959, when the University of Chicago prohibited editor Irving Rosenthal from publishing a winter issue that was to include Jack Kerouac's Sebastian Midnite, a thirty-page excerpt from William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch and a thirty-page work by Edward Dahlberg. The concern of the university was that the work might be deemed obscene. All but one editor quit the paper. Rosenthal, Ginsberg and others responded by founding Big Table; its first issue included ten chapters of Naked Lunch.
In the context of the ongoing nation-wide conflict between traditional vs. Beat fiction, the impact of the creation of Big Table was such that, as Thomas Pynchon recalled, among the literature college students at Cornell University, "'What happened at Chicago' became shorthand for some unimaginable subversive threat."
The Chicago Review also played a significant role in introducing Zen to the American public.
Read more about this topic: Chicago Review
Famous quotes containing the words early, history, poetry, censorship and/or controversy:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Don’t you realize that this is a new empire? Why, folks, there’s never been anything like this since creation. Creation, huh, that took six days, this was done in one. History made in an hour. Why it’s a miracle out of the Old Testament!”
—Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)
“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)