Big Table records

Big Table was a literary periodical that published and promoted progressive, modernist, and Beat prose and poetry. It ran for five issues from 1959 to 1960 and was the subject of a 1960 obscenity suit. The journal originated as an offshoot of The Chicago Review after the University of Chicago suppressed the Winter 1959 issue, which was to contain ten chapters of William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch, as well as new work by Jack Kerouac and Edward Dahlberg. The publication ran into legal difficulties after the U.S. Post Office deemed it "unmailable" due to its "obscenity and filthy contents." Eventually a judge ruled in favor of the magazine and ordered that the Post Office Department allow it to be mailed openly. In its short life, Big Table published major works by Beat writers Allen Ginsberg (including "Kaddish"), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Paul Blackburn, and Robert Duncan, and included work by establishment writers such as John Logan or Norman Mailer.