Before censorship by the university administration, Chicago Review was an early and leading promoter of the Beat Movement in American literature.

Rosenthal, Ginsberg, John Fles, and others responded by founding Big Table; its first issue included ten chapters of Naked Lunch.

[12][13][14][15] In the context of the ongoing nationwide conflict between traditional versus Beat fiction, the impact of the creation of Big Table was such that, as Thomas Pynchon recalled "'what happened at Chicago' became shorthand for some unimaginable subversive threat" among the literature college students at Cornell University[16] Chicago Review often publishes special features within its issues.

In the summer of 1958, it published Volume 12, Number 3 (Issue 12:3) with a special section titled "On Zen" that featured contributions from writers such as Alan Watts and Jack Kerouac.

Other notable features published by Chicago Review include a special section on Canadian poet Lisa Robertson in Issue 51:4/52:1, an A.R.