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Description
Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker 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 surprise 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.
For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of the unhappiness of American society as a whole, run by corporations that provide employment (if and when they do) but not the kind of meaningful work that engages body and soul. Goodman saw the young as the first casualties of a humanly repressive social and economic system and, as such, the front line of potential resistance.
Noam Chomsky has said, “Paul Goodman’s impact is all about us,” and certainly it can be felt in the powerful localism of today’s renascent left. A classic of anarchist thought, Growing Up Absurd not only offers a penetrating indictment of the human costs of corporate capitalism but points the way forward. It is a tale of yesterday’s youth that speaks directly to our common future.
About the Author
Paul Goodman (9/9/11–8/2/72) was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, public intellectual & gay-rights activist. He's now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd & as an activist on the pacifist Left in the '60s & an inspiration to that era's student movement. He's less remembered as a cofounder of Gestalt Therapy in the '40s & '50s.In the mid-40s, together with C. Wright Mills, he contributed to Politics, a journal edited then by Dwight Macdonald. In '47, he published Kafka's Prayer & Communitas, a classic study of urban design coauthored with his brother Percival. Fame came only with the '60 publication of his Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. He also knew & worked with other leading NY intellectuals, including Daniel Bell, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Norman Podhoretz, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling & Philip Rahv. His writings also appeared in Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, The New Leader, Dissent & NY Review of Books.
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