James Cummins Bookseller

Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958.

Price: $750.00

About the item

88 pp [vi. pages of ads]. 8vo. SIGNED by Burroughs. Illustrated card wrappers with rubbing and chipping along spine, light crease to top corner on cover and slight bump to bottom corner; else very good. Signed in black ink by William Burroughs on page 3 beneath his name.

Item #338548

A classic Beat Generation era issue containing an early selection from William Burroughs's Naked Lunch. The 1958 appearance of a Naked Lunch excerpt in the Chicago Review created a scandal that ended in the resignation of the magazine’s two editors, Irving Rosenthal and Paul Carroll. The controversy was initiated when an editorial review by Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley appeared under the title 'Filthy Writing on the Midway.' Mabley objected to what he called obscene writing in the University of Chicago’s literary magazine. The resulting furor, including the refusal of the U.S. Post Office to mail Paul Carroll's subsequent magazine, Big Table, led to the immediate publication of Naked Lunch by Maurice Girodias of the Paris-based Olympia Press, who had created a similar sensation by publishing Nabokov's Lolita.
Published alongside Burroughs in the Chicago Review were Lawrence Ferlinghetti, two letters by Allen Ginsberg that mention Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, prose by Philip Whalen, and other young and unconventional writers of the time. Irving Rosenthal went on to write one of the great but unheralded novels of the era, 'Sheeper,' in which Burroughs and the Beats appear.