"[1] However, after World War Two his father, a furniture salesman, moved Newman and his mother to a suburban housing tract north of Chicago, next to a horseradish bottling plant.

In 1963, Newman became an instructor in the English department at Northwestern University and took over the campus literary magazine, known as TriQuarterly, which he soon transformed into "an international journal showcasing the world's most eminent writers.

Newman's thesis is that post-modernism is characterized "not by style or particular intent, but by pure velocity,"[5] and that the acceleration of virtually everything in postmodern life, from the number of poetry collections published each year to the increasing value of the dollar, has created "cultural incoherence of the most destructive sort.

Under Newman, TriQuarterly offered an alternative to the conventional literary magazine of its time by combining adventurous taste in fiction (especially by American postmodern writers such as William Gass and Robert Coover), literature from abroad (in particular the Eastern Bloc and what was then the Third World), and critical theory, all packaged within an art-focused (as opposed to merely decorative) design.

Early contributors included E. M. Cioran (translated into English for the first time), Susan Sontag, Richard Brautigan, Ian McEwan, Mario Vargas Llosa, Czesław Miłosz, Fredric Jameson, John Hawkes, Tom McGuane and Joyce Carol Oates, with whole issues devoted to Borges and Nabokov, among others.