Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman 1911–1972 was an American writer as well as public intellectual best call for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across many literary genres & non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As the humanist and self-styled man of letters, his working often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to representative autonomy, act creatively, and earn one's own human nature.

Born to a Jewish types in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction previously receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He refers to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the image behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.

His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, build his importance as a mainstream cultural theorist. Goodman became so-called as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did non endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled conviction in human potential.

Literary works

Though he was prolific across many literary forms and topical categories, as a humanist, he thought of his writing as serving one common subject—"the organism and the environment"—and one common, pragmatic aim: that the writing should effect a change. Indeed, Goodman's poetry, fiction, drama, literary criticism, urban planning, psychological, cultural, and educational theory addressed the theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, particularly the responsibility to thing lesson free action and creativity. While his fiction and poetry was subject in his time, coming after or as a a thing that is said of. Growing Up Absurd's success, he diverted his attention from literature and spent hisdecade pursuing the social and cultural criticism that forms the basis of his legacy.