A short life of the author
Paul Goodman (9 September 1911 – 2 August 1972) was an American writer, social critic, anarchist, psychotherapist, and polymath who was one of the most influential public intellectuals of the 1960s — a man who wrote novels, poems, plays, literary criticism, urban planning theory, educational philosophy, and political polemics with equal seriousness, and whose book Growing Up Absurd (1960) became the intellectual foundation of the New Left before it had a name.
Early Life and Intellectual Formation
Goodman was born in New York City to a family that abandoned him to be raised by relatives. He grew up poor on the streets of Washington Heights, attended the City College of New York, and did graduate work in literature at the University of Chicago without completing a doctorate. He was openly bisexual at a time when this meant social ostracism, and he lost teaching positions at several universities because of his sexual relationships with male students — a fact he discussed frankly in his writing.
He was, by temperament and conviction, an anarchist — not in the bomb-throwing caricature but in the tradition of Kropotkin and the libertarian left, believing that genuine community and meaningful work required the decentralisation of power, the dismantling of bureaucratic institutions, and the restoration of human-scale social arrangements.
Gestalt Therapy (1951)
Goodman co-authored Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality with Frederick Perls and Ralph Hefferline. Goodman wrote the theoretical second volume, which transformed Perls’s clinical insights into a coherent philosophical framework. The book argued that neurosis resulted from the interruption of natural contact between the organism and its environment, and that therapy should focus on present experience rather than past trauma. Gestalt therapy became one of the most influential therapeutic approaches of the twentieth century, and Goodman’s theoretical contribution — though less publicly acknowledged than Perls’s charismatic clinical practice — was essential.
Growing Up Absurd (1960)
Goodman’s most famous book was rejected by nineteen publishers before Norman Podhoretz, then the editor of Commentary, serialised portions of it. It argues that American society had become so organised around corporate conformity, consumer acquisition, and meaningless work that it offered young men (Goodman’s focus was explicitly on males, a limitation he later acknowledged) no genuine path to adulthood. The “organisation man” culture demanded that young people surrender their autonomy, creativity, and sense of purpose in exchange for security and status — and many of them, quite rationally, refused.
The book spoke directly to the emerging counterculture. It gave intellectual coherence to the inchoate disaffection of young Americans who felt that something was profoundly wrong with postwar prosperity but lacked the vocabulary to articulate it. It sold over 100,000 copies in hardcover — remarkable for a work of social criticism — and made Goodman one of the most sought-after speakers on college campuses.
Communitas (1947, revised 1960)
Written with his brother Percival Goodman, an architect, Communitas is a study of urban planning that proposes three models for organising community life. The book argues that urban design is inseparable from social values — that the way we build cities expresses and reinforces our assumptions about work, leisure, consumption, and human dignity. It influenced the New Urbanist movement and Jane Jacobs, who admired Goodman’s work.
Educational Philosophy
Compulsory Mis-education (1964) and The Community of Scholars (1962) argue that the American educational system is designed not to educate but to socialise young people into compliance, and that compulsory schooling actively damages intellectual curiosity and personal autonomy. Goodman proposed alternatives: apprenticeships, decentralised schools, the abolition of compulsory attendance laws. These ideas directly influenced Ivan Illich and the “deschooling” movement of the 1970s.
The Literary Work
Goodman was also a serious novelist and poet, though his literary work has been largely eclipsed by his social criticism. The Empire City (1959) is a sprawling, experimental novel in four volumes that follows a group of New York intellectuals through the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. His poetry — collected in numerous volumes — is direct, personal, and influenced by the Objectivist tradition.
He wrote plays that were performed off-Broadway, and his literary criticism — particularly on Kafka, Hawthorne, and the structure of fiction — is incisive and original, though rarely cited today.
Death and Legacy
Goodman died of a heart attack in 1972 at age sixty. His later years were marked by the death of his son Mathew in a mountaineering accident in 1967, an event from which he never fully recovered. His final book, New Reformation (1970), argued that the counterculture’s critique of technology and bureaucracy had the character of a religious reformation — a moral awakening that transcended politics.
His influence has been diffuse rather than institutional. He left no school, no organisation, no systematic body of theory. But his insistence that meaningful work, genuine community, and personal autonomy are not luxuries but necessities — and that a society that cannot provide them is not merely inefficient but morally bankrupt — remains one of the most powerful critiques of postwar American life.
Collecting Goodman
Growing Up Absurd (1960, Random House) in first edition with dust jacket brings $50–$100. Communitas (1947, University of Chicago Press) is scarcer and more valuable. The Empire City (1959, Bobbs-Merrill) is uncommon. Goodman’s numerous smaller publications — pamphlets, chapbooks, limited-edition poetry collections — are collectible in the anarchist and counterculture book trade.