Big Table grew out of The Chicago Review in 1959.  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 Old Angel Midnight, 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, Allen Ginsberg and others responded by founding Big Table; its first issue included ten chapters of Naked Lunch.^[

Vol. 1: Includes Old Angel Midnight by Jack Kerouac, ten episodes from Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and two works by Edward Dahlberg, The Garment of Ra and Further Sorrows of Priapus. Vol. 2: Includes Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg, two essays concerning William S. Burroughs, Anyone Who Can Pick Up a Frying Pan Owns Death by Alan Ansen and Burroughs in Tangier by Paul Bowles. These are followed by In Quest of Yage by Willaim Burroughs. Also two black & white photographs of Burroughs. Vol. 3: Includes further excepts from Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg, Because I Was Flesh by Edward Dahlberg and Her by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Vol. 4: Entitled The New American Poets, it includes But it is All Back Seat of Dreaming by William S. Burroughs, Notes on Young Poets and Message by Allen Ginsberg. Vol. 5: Includes further excerpts from Because I Was Flesh by Edward Dahlberg.