Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was a notable American writer, philosopher, and social critic known for his radical views on society and his advocacy for decentralization and anarchism. Drawing inspiration from figures like Pyotr Kropotkin and Mohandas K. Gandhi, Goodman challenged centralized power structures across government and business, arguing that they were oppressive. His educational background included studies at City College of New York and the University of Chicago, where he faced difficulties partly due to his open bisexuality. Goodman's literary output spanned fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, with significant works such as "Growing Up Absurd," which addressed the struggles of youth in urban settings.
He was also influential in the realm of therapeutic practices, particularly Gestalt therapy, co-authoring foundational texts in the field. Throughout the 1960s, Goodman became a prominent figure in countercultural movements, voicing opposition to the Vietnam War and engaging in discussions about educational reform. Despite achieving widespread recognition, including posthumous publications of his work, Goodman's reputation declined in the years following his death. Nevertheless, he left a lasting impact on anarchist, decentralist, and queer thought, continuing to inspire discussions about social structure and authority.
Subject Terms
Paul Goodman
American novelist, poet, playwright, and critic
- Born: September 9, 1911
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: August 2, 1972
- Place of death: North Stratford, New Hampshire
Biography
Paul Goodman was a radical critic of American society, an anarchist who believed that centralized power, whether government or business, was inherently oppressive. He traced his worldview to Pyotr Kropotkin, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Thomas Jefferson, and he wrote fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in support of his views.
Goodman was born in 1911, the fourth child of Barnett and Augusta Goodman. His father abandoned his mother while she was pregnant with him. His mother, a traveling salesperson for women’s clothing, spent most of her time on the road and left the raising of young Paul to his aunts and his sister, Alice, who was nine years older than he. He graduated from Townsend Harris, a selective New York City public high school, in 1927 and went on to the City College of New York, from which he graduated with an AB in philosophy in 1931.
For the next six years, he concentrated on writing, living with his sister and having no regular employment (though he was briefly employed as a script reader by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In 1936 he entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student in literature and philosophy. He passed the qualifying exams for a doctorate in literature but was asked to leave in 1940, probably because of his open bisexuality.
In 1938 he entered a common-law marriage with Virginia Miller. Their daughter, Susan, was born in 1939; the couple separated in 1943. In that year Goodman was employed as an instructor at Manumit School of Progressive Education in Pawling, New York, but he was fired the following year, once again because of his sexuality. In 1945 he began another common-law marriage, with secretary Sally Duchsten. They remained together for the rest of his life. The following year, his son Matthew was born. (They would have a second child, Daisy, in 1963.) In 1947 he collaborated with his brother, architect Percival Goodman, to write what became one of his best-known books, Communitas, which recommended decentralized approaches to urban living. At around this time, personal problems and his interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich inspired him to enter therapy. One of his therapists was the well-known Reichian Alexander Lowen. Goodman moved on to Gestalt therapy with Lore Perls and wound up writing the second volume of Gestalt Therapy with her husband, Frederick Perls, and with Ralph Hefferline.
In 1954 Goodman completed his doctoral dissertation, The Structure of Literature, an atypical work of literary theory. Throughout the 1950s he worked as a Gestalt lay therapist and wrote fiction, poetry, and essays, generally published by smaller, avant-garde publishers. In 1959 he combined four earlier novels into The Empire City, which achieved some critical notice.
Goodman’s breakthrough came in 1960 with the publication of Growing Up Absurd, a study of the problems of Puerto Rican youths in New York City that was immediately recognized for its radical assault on the accepted centralized, bureaucratic solutions to the problems of the young, the poor, and minorities. The following year, he and Percival published an article with the idea for which he became best known, “Banning Cars from Manhattan.” Goodman had a number of traits that blended well with the popular culture of the 1960s, including his questioning of accepted authority, his belief in small, voluntary social structures, and his rejection of contemporary sexual mores.
For the next ten years, he was a popular and productive figure. The novel Making Do featured a protagonist much like its author. The educational studies The Community of Scholars and Compulsory Mis-Education challenged the public schools. His social critiques appeared in the essay collection Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals and the monographs People or Personnel and Like a Conquered Province, the latter a series of lectures he first delivered on the Canadian Broadcasting Company network. Five Years was a series of diary entries from the 1950s, covering everything from political theory to cruising. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College (1960–1961), the University of Wisconsin (1964), and the experimental college at San Francisco State College (1966). As the Vietnam War heated up, he spoke out against it and joined the draft resistance movement.
His health, however, was starting to fail. The death of his son, Matthew, in a 1967 mountain-climbing accident plunged him into depression, and he developed cardiac problems. In 1970 he published his last book of social criticism, New Reformation, in which he looked at the 1960s youth movement he had helped to create. He found much to admire but thought that popular resistance to authority had gone too far, to a rejection of any sort of expertise or professionalism, and he was bemused to find his own words and ideas quoted back to him as if they were ancient, anonymous folk sayings. During 1971 to 1972 he took a visiting professorship at the University of Hawaii. His health continued to decline, and he died of a heart attack at his home in North Stratford, New Hampshire, on August 2, 1972.
Posthumous collections of his poetry, stories, and essays were published in the 1970s, and his nonfiction works Crazy Hope and Finite Experience and The Moral Ambiguity of America were published in 1994 and 2012, respectively. But, like many other 1960s celebrities, he suffered a precipitous fall from public favor in that decade. He remained an influence on anarchist, decentralist, and queer thought.
Author Works
Nonfiction:
Kafka’s Prayer, 1947
Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life, 1947 (with Percival Goodman)
Gestalt Therapy, 1951 (with Frederick S. Perls and Ralph Hefferline)
The Structure of Literature, 1954
Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, 1960
The Community of Scholars, 1962
Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, 1962
The Society I Live in Is Mine, 1963
Compulsory Mis-Education, 1964
People or Personnel: Decentralizing and the Mixed System, 1965
Five Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time, 1966
Like a Conquered Province: The Moral Ambiguity of America, 1967
New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, 1970
Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry, 1971
Little Prayers and Finite Experience, 1972
Drawing the Line: The Political Essays of Paul Goodman, 1977
Nature Heals: The Psychological Essays of Paul Goodman, 1977
Creator Spirit Come! The Literary Essays of Paul Goodman, 1977
Crazy Hope and Final Experience: Final Essays of Paul Goodman, 1994
The Moral Ambiguity of America, 2012
Long Fiction
The Grand Piano: Or, The Almanac of Alienation, 1942
The State of Nature, 1946
The Dead of Spring, 1950
Parents’ Day, 1951
The Empire City, 1959 (includes The Grand Piano, The State of Nature, The Dead of Spring, and The Holy Terror)
Making Do, 1963
Short Fiction
The Facts of Life, 1945
The Break-Up of Our Camp, and Other Stories, 1949
Our Visit to Niagara, 1960
Adam and His Works, 1968
The Collected Stories and Sketches of Paul Goodman, 1977-1980 (4 volumes Taylor Stoehr, editor)
Poetry
Stop-light: Five Dance Poems, 1941
The Lordly Hudson: Collected Poems, 1962
Hawkweed, 1967
North Percy, 1968
Homespun of Oatmeal Gray, 1970
Collected Poems, 1973
Drama
Jonah, pb. 1945
Faustina, pr. 1949
The Young Disciple, pr. 1955
Tragedy and Comedy: Four Cubist Plays, pb. 1970
Bibliography
Fried, Lewis F. Makers of the City. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Fried demonstrates that Goodman’s exploration of the ideas of community and of urban culture unites his fiction and nonfiction. Includes detailed notes and bibliographical essay.
Gilman, Richard. Review of The Empire City, by Paul Goodman. Commonweal 70 (July 31, 1959): 401-402. This short article examines The Empire City as a part of the comic tradition of J. D. Salinger and Saul Bellow. Also cites Goodman’s debt to Franz Kafka for his sense of the bizarre. Objects to the sermonizing quality of Goodman’s fiction but notes that his characters are intended to teach us how to live.
Harrington, Michael. “On Paul Goodman.” Atlantic 216 (August, 1965): 88-91. This short article is a general review of Goodman’s work and a more intensive examination of his essays People or Personnel. Looks at Goodman as an existentialist critic of American life and as a philosopher of the student revolts of the 1960’s, finding his belief in the goodness of human nature naïve.
Nicely, Tom. Adam and His Work: A Bibliography of Sources by and About Paul Goodman, 1911-1972. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979. A thorough bibliography.
Ostriker, Alicia. “Paul Goodman.” Partisan Review 43, no. 2 (1976): 286-295. Offers a good introduction to Goodman’s poetry as part of the general tradition first of Walt Whitman, then of the Black Mountain poets and the Beat generation. Notes the vigor and explicitness of his political and sexual poetry but points out that his lack of metaphoric imagination and decorum makes his poetry “unpoetic” to some readers.
Paul, Sherman. “Paul Goodman’s Mourning Labor: The Empire City.” Review of The Empire City, by Paul Goodman. The Southern Review 4, no. 4 (1968): 894-926. This meaty review is a book-by-book analysis of The Empire City. Examines its major themes of the education of a young man, looking especially at its themes dealing with war and at its position in the tradition of the philosophical novel.
Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1969. Discusses Goodman’s theories at length, seeing them as a major element in the transformation of American society.
Scott, A. O. “Gadfly of the ’60s, Getting His Due.” Review of Paul Goodman Saved My Life, directed by Jonathan Lee. The New York Times, 19 Oct. 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/movies/paul-goodman-changed-my-life-directed-by-jonathan-lee-review.html. Reviews the documentary film Paul Goodman Saved My Life and discusses Goodman’s influence in the mid-twentieth century and his later obscurity.
Steiner, George. “On Paul Goodman.” Commentary 36 (August, 1963): 158-163. An important look at Goodman’s thinking and writing.
Sontag, Susan. Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. Contains one of the most sensitive essays on Goodman, treating his fiction seriously and suggesting his reputation has suffered because he wrote in so many different genres rather than concentrating on a single form of literature.
Stoehr, Taylor, ed. Decentralizing Power: Paul Goodman’s Social Criticism. New York: Black Rose Books, 1994. Collects essays on the diverse aspects of Goodman’s social thought.
Widmer, Kingsley. Paul Goodman. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A sustained attack, in which fellow anarchist Widmer condemns Goodman for his personality, his prose, and many of his political ideas.