Chicago Review

The Chicago Review is a literary magazine published four times per year in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. It was founded in 1946. Three stories published in the Chicago Review have won the O. Henry Award. Work that first appeared in the Chicago Review has also been reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2002, The Best American Poetry 2004, and The Best American Short Stories 2003.

Many well-known writers have published in the review, both before and after they became famous, including Henry Miller, Phillip Roth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams, Anaïs Nin, Charles Simic, James Tate, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Philip Levine, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Palmer, Robert Pinsky, Edward Dorn, Anne Carson, and Robert Duncan, amongst many others.

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.