The Paul Goodman Reader by Paul Goodman

The Paul Goodman Reader by Paul Goodman

A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties. A Paul Goodman Reader that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like Growing Up Absurd, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from The Empire City, a comic novel reviewers compared to Don Quixote, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America's most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, "Not one dull page. It's almost unbelievable."

Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.

In his bestselling book Growing Up Absurd, Paul Goodman, recognized as the philosopher of the New Left at the time, set the agenda for the 1960s youth movement. Over that chaotic decade, he published new books every year while teaching to hundreds of audiences on college campuses on topics ranging from movement politics to education and community planning, from psychology and religion to literature and media. Simultaneously, a steady stream of poems, plays, and fiction inspired composer and diarist Ned Rorem to write, In an increasingly specialized culture, he shined as a Renaissance artist. His work still resonates for our own times of national crises, as he was America's most recognized public intellectual at the time of his death in 1972.