Paul Goodman (writer)

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was a poet, writer, public intellectual.

Goodman is now mainly remembered as a notable political activist on the pacifist left in the 1960s and 70s. Politically he described himself as an anarchist, sexually as bisexual, and professionally as a "man of letters".

Born in New York, he freely roamed the streets and public libraries of the city as a child (and later developed, from this, the radical concept of 'the educative city'). He taught at the University of Chicago while he taking his Ph.D, but fell in love with a student and was dismissed. He fathered a family by two common-law wives, and his early years were characterized by menial and teaching jobs taken to enable him to continue as a writer and to support his children. His first novel, The Grand Piano, was published in 1940. More novels followed, including the notorious Parents' Day (1951), and more than 100 short-stories. But public recognition only came when he was nearly fifty, in 1960 with Growing Up Absurd: problems of youth in the organized system. This led to him being taken up, as a guiding light, by the radical counterculture of the mid & late 1960s.

His Collected Poems was first published in 1974. During his life he wrote on a wide variety of subjects; including education, Gestalt Therapy, city life and urban design (the influential classic Communitas (1947)), children's rights, politics, literary criticism, and many more.

He was at home with the avant-garde as he was with classical texts, and his fiction often mixes formal and experimental styles. The freedom with which he admitted, in print and in public, to his homosexual life and loves (notably in a late essay, "The Politics of Being Queer" (1969)), proved to be one of the many important cultural springboards for the emerging gay liberation movement of the early 1970s. The subject matter and style of Goodman's short stories have been an influence on those of Guy Davenport.

Further reading

• Kingsley Widmer. Paul Goodman (Twayne, 1980)
• Tom Nicely. Adam & His Work: a bibliography of sources by and about Paul Goodman (1911-1972) (Scarecrow Press, 1979).
• Black Sparrow Press keeps some of Goodman's fiction in print, including The Collected Stories (published in 4 volumes from 1978-80).

External links

• Goodman texts online
• The Radical Individualism of Paul Goodman