Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman, known in his day as "the philosopher of the New Left," set the agenda for the youth movement of the Sixties with his best-selling Growing Up Absurd. He produced new books every year throughout that turbulent decade, while lecturing to hundreds of audiences on the nation’s campuses, covering subjects that ranged from movement politics to education and community planning; from psychotherapy and religion to literature, language theory, and media. There was little that did not fall within his purview as an old-fashioned "man of letters." During this same heady period of his fame he also published his public letters and his journals, the Living Theatre performed his plays, his poems were set to music, and his fiction was chosen for book club distribution. America’s most celebrated public intellectual at the time of his death in 1972, his work still resonates for our own times of national crisis.