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:
“Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“All history and art are against us, but we still expect happiness in love.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“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)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)