The Paul Goodman Reader

(Paperback)

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A one man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman is both a prolific writer and famed social critic. This compendious volume features excerpts not only from his bestselling titles such as Growing Up Absurd (Vintage, 1973), but also from his landmark books on education, psychotherapy, language, poetics and Anarchism. Also featured are samples from his comic novels, poems and short stories creating a must-have reader of this acclaimed writer's dynamic, engaging and challenging work which continues to resonate.

Reviews

"It was that voice of his that seduced me--that direct, cranky, egotistical, generous American voice... Paul Goodman's voice touched everything he wrote about with intensity, interest, and his own terribly appealing sureness and awkwardness... It was his voice, that is to say, his intelligence and the poetry of his intelligence incarnated, which kept me a loyal and passionate fan."
--Susan Sontag, novelist and public intellectual

"Goodman, like all real novelists, is, at bottom, a moralist. What really interests him are the various ways in which human beings living in a modern metropolis gain, keep or lose their integrity and sense of selfhood."
--W.H. Auden, poet

"Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time."
--Hayden Carruth, poet and essayist

"No one writing now in America makes better sense of literary subjects. His ability to combine linguistic criticism, politics, a version of the nature of man, anthropology, the history of philosophy, and autobiographical testament with literary analysis, and to make a closely woven fabric of argument, seems magical."
--Robert Meredith, The Nation

Author Bio

Paul Goodman was the author of Drawing the Line and Growing Up Absurd. Known as the philosopher of the New Left, he set the agenda for the youth movement of the 1960s, producing new books every year throughout the decade while lecturing to hundreds of audiences on subjects from movement politics and community planning to language theory and the media. Taylor Stoehr is Paul Goodman's literary executor and a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He has edited numerous volumes of Goodman's fiction, poetry, and social commentary in addition to being the author of several other books on literary and cultural criticism and the translator of two poetry collections. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.