Paul Goodman Reader - Paperback

by Paul Goodman (Author), Taylor Stoehr (Editor)

A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties. A Paul Goodman Reader that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like Growing Up Absurd, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from The Empire City, a comic novel reviewers compared to Don Quixote, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America's most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, "Not one dull page. It's almost unbelievable."

Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.

Author Biography

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.