“I’m no ordinary type, you can bet on that.” [CR 11:1, p.75]
On April 22, 2022, Irving Rosenthal, legendary editor, publisher, and activist, passed away at the commune he founded in San Francisco. Throughout his life, Rosenthal shunned the spotlight of the literary establishment, but for the staff of Chicago Review, Rosenthal’s passing marks the loss of a towering figure in the history of our publication.
Serving as editor from 1958–59, Rosenthal oversaw the publication of three issues of CR, which consisted of special features on Zen poetry, San Francisco poets, and most notoriously, a thirty-page excerpt from William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. After Jack Mabley referred to the issue in the Chicago Daily News as “one of the foulest collections of printed filth I’ve seen publicly circulated,” University administrators intervened to insist Rosenthal’s next issue be “completely innocuous.” In the now-famous episode, Rosenthal protested the University’s censorship by resigning with all but one member of the editorial staff, taking with him galleys from the planned next issue, which he published in the first issue of the newly formed Big Table.
Ironically, it was in abandoning the review that Rosenthal established himself as a founding father of the Chicago Review ethos: irreverent, principled, strange, at home on the edge of life at UChicago, with one wary eye on its benefactors within the University.
After he left Chicago, Rosenthal lived a long and rich life, travelling through New York, Cuba, Morocco, Greece, and Spain before settling in San Francisco. There, in 1967, he founded the Scott Street or Sutter Street commune, later known as Kaliflower, where he lived for the rest of his life. The commune, which would become famous for its role at the center of the Haight-Ashbury movements, was a utopian project, dedicated to principles of communal property, gay liberation, group marriage, free art, and service. Its operations included the Free Print Shop, an underground publishing operation for Bay Area communes, and a food donation program, known as the Free Food Conspiracy. The commune remains an important part of the community.
As former Chicago Review editor Eirik Steinhoff has reflected with us, Rosenthal’s “radical example in each of these zones reflected an aesthetics, an ethics, and a politics of a life lived otherwise, and sparked off possibilities that encouraged others to co-create their own version of a life lived in right relation, undetermined and undeterred by the bad norms that would seek to police us.”
As we pause to reflect on the influence of Rosenthal’s work, both at Chicago Review and beyond it, it is clear to us that his commitment to political engagement and free expression at the University of Chicago remains more important than ever.
See our special feature Chicago Review, the Beats, and Big Table: 60 Years On for more on Irving Rosenthal’s lasting legacy.