Big Table
The first issue of Big Table, shown here, was created in response to censorship: when the editors of the Chicago Review attempted to publish Beat writing by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, among others, the University of Chicago suppressed the magazine. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, which is excerpted in this issue, went on to be the subject of an obscenity trial upon its publication in 1962. The Supreme Court ultimately found in Memoirs vs. Massachusetts, 1966, that a “book cannot be held to be obscene in view of substantial evidence showing that it has literary, historical, and social importance." The Beats' literary, historical, and social importance is now, of course, well understood.