Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman (September 9, 1911 – August 2, 1972) was an American writer and public intellectual whose fame peaked in the 1960s with his social criticism. He wrote across a vast range of genres and subjects—arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. A humanist who called himself a man of letters, he consistently explored the duties of individual citizens within society, urging people to act autonomously, creatively, and in tune with their own human nature.

Goodman was born in New York City to a Sephardic Jewish family that had been in the country for generations; his grandfather fought in the Civil War. His father abandoned the family before Paul was born, leaving him the youngest of four children. Raised mostly by his aunts and sister in Washington Heights, he attended Hebrew school and public schools, excelling in literature and languages at Townsend Harris Hall High School, where he graduated first in his class in 1927. He then studied classical literature and philosophy at City College of New York, influenced by the Jewish philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, and discovered “community anarchism” after reading Peter Kropotkin. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1931, early in the Great Depression.

After college, Goodman wrote poems, essays, stories, and a play while living with his sister, who supported him. He worked odd jobs—reading scripts for MGM and teaching drama at a Zionist summer camp—but couldn’t afford graduate tuition at Columbia, so he audited classes there and at Harvard. When Columbia professor Richard McKeon moved to the University of Chicago, he invited Goodman to attend and lecture. From 1936 to 1940, Goodman was a graduate student, research assistant, and part-time instructor in literature and philosophy. He passed his preliminary exams in 1940 but was expelled for “nonconformist sexual behavior,” a pattern that would repeat throughout his teaching career. By then he was married and openly bisexual.

Homesick and without his doctorate, Goodman returned to New York City and joined the literary avant-garde. He worked on his dissertation for 14 years before publishing it. Unable to find teaching work, he reviewed films for *Partisan Review* and published his first poetry book in 1941 and his first novel, *The Grand Piano*, in 1942. He taught at the progressive Manumit boarding school in 1943–44 but was fired for “homosexual behavior.” *Partisan Review* also dropped him because of his bisexuality and his advocacy for draft resistance (Goodman himself was deferred and rejected from the WWII draft).

World War II turned Goodman from an avant-garde writer into a vocal pacifist and decentralist. He discovered anarchism and wrote for New York’s libertarian Why? Group and Dwight Macdonald’s *Politics*. His collected anarchist essays from this period, “The May Pamphlet,” formed the basis of his lifelong libertarian social criticism. In the late 1940s, he also moved into psychoanalytic therapy and urban planning. In 1945, he entered a second common-law marriage that lasted until his death. He taught night school at NYU and spent a summer at Black Mountain College, but the family lived in poverty on his wife’s salary. By 1946, he was a popular but “marginal” figure in New York bohemia and began psychoanalytic therapy with Alexander Lowen. Through this work, he co-developed the theory behind Gestalt therapy, rooted in Wilhelm Reich’s radical Freudianism, and ran psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.

His 1960 book *Growing Up Absurd* made him a mainstream antiestablishment cultural theorist. Dubbed “the philosopher of the New Left,” his anarchist ideas shaped the 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Though he was the leading American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his day, his celebrity faded quickly after his death. He is remembered for his utopian proposals and his principled belief in human potential.