The Paul Goodman Reader

A one-man think tank, Paul Goodman wrote more than 30 books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the 1960s. Goodman in those earlier days thought of himself mostly as an old-fashioned man of letters, and to do justice to his wide-ranging interests and growing activism, this compendium provides excerpts that span his entire career, from the bestsellingGrowing Up Absurdto landmark books on anarchism, community planning, education, poetics, and psychotherapy. Goodman's fiction and poetry are represented byThe Empire City, a comic novel; prize-winning short stories; and poems that once led America's most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, "Not one dull page. It's almost unbelievable."

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.