Official suppression of obscenity scattered avant-garde work into new independent venues

Evidence

Around the time Kerouac appeared at Hunter, a group of University of Chicago students had published a nine-page excerpt from William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in the university literary magazine, The Chicago Review. Attacked by a Chicago Daily News columnist for facilitating “one of the foulest collections of printed filth” he’d seen publicly circulated, the panicked administration suppressed the upcoming issue, which was to have a second helping of Naked Lunch plus poems by Kerouac and Gregory Corso. … The student editors, Irving Rosenthal and Paul Carroll, resigned and started a new magazine, Big Table (title suggested by Kerouac), which, in March 1959, published the complete contents of the banned issue. Although the Chicago post office refused to send the “obscene” material through the mail and impounded the magazine, copies circulated in San Francisco and New York. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 80

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading purpose: official censorship directly creating the independent magazine infrastructure of the scene — a concrete mechanism for how suppression feeds avant-garde distribution.