Overview

Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd was a runaway bestseller when it was first published in 1960 and it became one of the defining texts of the nascent New Left. Goodman, at the time well into middle age, was a maverick anarchist who broke every mold, and did it brilliantly-he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things-and the book's success established him as one of America's most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words. Growing Up Absurd takes the crisis of disaffected youth as indicative of the crisis within the culture at large, which Goodman describes as being run by corporations that provide employment (when they do) but not work in any meaningful sense, work that engages body and soul. Disaffected youth was in this sense at the forefront of a disruption of a social order that was, if not directly politically repressive, humanly repressive, stifling the real human potential which, surely, a good society would serve to unleash, encourage, and pass on.

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<i>Growing up Absurd</i> by Paul Goodman pretty much founded the modern passion for school reform. Paul Berman Paul Goodman, a man deeply dissatisfied with things as they are, deserves more attention than other less-conscientious objectors .His book is a highly serious effort to understand the relation between society and the disaffected youngster. John K. Galbraith, <i>The New York Times</i> Goodman might be called an intuitive sociologist in his unconventional, erratic yet convincing analysis of the encouragement toward human waste that our wasteful society provides. <i>Growing Up Absurd</i> is his cruelly apt phrase for this fatal lack of purpose and idealism. If [John] Updike s anxiety for his fellow man is subtle, Goodman s angry polemic leaves us no doubt what makes Rabbit run. <i>The Washington Post</i>, 1960 His impact is all around us. Noam Chomsky Philosopher, poet, sociologist, pacifist, psychologist, writer, anarchist, open bisexual and spokesman for a generation. Paul Goodman ranked among the most influential thinkers in the latter half of the 20th century. Ronnie Scheib, <i>Variety</i> [The film] Paul Goodman Changed My Life pays tribute to a man poet teacher social critic, guru without portfolio whose name was once a household word and whose books were talismans of intellectual seriousness and social concern. His current obscurity is something this documentary, directed by Jonathan Lee and including eloquent testimony from friends, family and admirers, is determined to overcome .His most famous book, Growing Up Absurd, originally commissioned as a study of juvenile delinquency and later a bible of the 1960s student rebellion, remains essential and troubling reading for anyone who cares about the problems of the young. A.O. Scott, <i>The New York Times</i>, 10/19/11, from his review of the film Paul Goodman Changed My Life Mr. Goodman is terrifying. Utopians usually are when we take them (or they take themselves) seriously. And Goodman is all the more terrifying because he is a rational Utopian who has most of analytical apparatus and theoretical formulations of modern sociology, psychology, historiography and aesthetics at his finger tips. Webster Scott, <i>The Nation</i> The best analysis I have seen of the spiritual emptiness of our technological paradise. Sir Herbert Read Paul Goodman s <i>Growing Up Absurd</i> is an extraordinary good and important book the best book I know on the subject of youth .Goodman s is a serious, profound and old-fashionedly moral book. With great originality and lucidity, he argues that the Organization Man, the beat and the juvenile delinquent are merely reactions to the same basic problem . Kenneth Keniston, <i>The American Scholar</i>

Growing up Absurd by Paul Goodman... pretty much founded the modern passion for school reform. - Paul Berman <br> Paul Goodman, a man deeply dissatisfied with things as they are, deserves more attention than other less-conscientious objectors....His book is a highly serious effort to understand the relation between society and the disaffected youngster. - John K. Galbraith, The New York Times <br> Goodman might be called an intuitive sociologist in his unconventional, erratic yet convincing analysis of the encouragement toward human waste that our wasteful society provides. Growing Up Absurd is his cruelly apt phrase for this fatal lack of purpose and idealism. If [John] Updike's anxiety for his fellow man is subtle, Goodman's angry polemic leaves us no doubt what makes Rabbit run. - The Washington Post, 1960 <br> His impact is all around us. - Noam Chomsky <br> Philosopher, poet, sociologist, pacifist, psychologist, writer, anarchist, open bisexual and spokesman for a generation. Paul Goodman ranked among the most influential thinkers in the latter half of the 20th century. - Ronnie Scheib, Variety <br> [The film] Paul Goodman Changed My Life pays tribute to a man--poet teacher social critic, guru without portfolio--whose name was once a household word and whose books were talismans of intellectual seriousness and social concern. His current obscurity is something this documentary, directed by Jonathan Lee and including eloquent testimony from friends, family and admirers, is determined to overcome....His most famous book, Growing Up Absurd, originally commissioned as a study of juvenile delinquency and later a bible of the 1960s student rebellion, remains essential and troubling reading for anyone who cares about the problems of the young. - A.O. Scott, The New York Times, 10/19/11, from his review of the film Paul Goodman Changed My Life <br> Mr. Goodman is terrifying. Utopians usually are when we take them (or

Author Information

Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was an American social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist, and anarchist, whose writings appeared in Politics, Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, The New Leader, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books. He published several well-regarded but little-known books in a variety of fields-including city planning, Gestalt therapy, educational reform, literary criticism, and politics-before Growing Up Absurd, cancelled by its original publisher and turned down by a further eighteen, was brought out by Random House in 1960 and became an instant bestseller. Its author became an influential leader of the New Left and anti-war movements and a model for a new generation of critics like Susan Sontag, who wrote- ""There is no living American writer for whom I have left the same simple curiosity to read as quickly as possible anything he wrote on any subject."" Casey Nelson Blake is Founding Director of the American Studies Program and Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author or editor of several works, including The Arts of Democracy- Art, Public Culture, and the State. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories, I, Etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and seven works of nonfiction, among them Where the Stress Falls and Regarding the Pain of Others. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

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