PAUL GOODMAN (1911-1972) was an American social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist, and anarchist who was a frequent contributor to such journals as Politics, Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books. He published widely in a variety of fields-including city planning, Gestalt therapy, educational reform, literary criticism, and politics-before writing Growing Up Absurd, which in 1960 became an enormous bestseller. SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004) was the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. CASEY NELSON BLAKE is Founding Director of the American Studies Program and Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author or editor of several works, including The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State.
"[Growing Up Absurd] is deeply concerned with the challenges of
growing up in American society, using delinquent youth as a doorway
into the reality that society was becoming, for most, a meaningless
rat race…This is the kind of book that you’d see Don Draper
pondering alone at the end of some episode of Mad Men. Yet, in many
respects, the book truly does contain quite a bit that applies in
2023…A better sense of the social contract and more emphasis on
vocation would be as much of an improvement now as ever."
—Elizabeth Stice, Current
“Growing up Absurd by Paul Goodman… pretty much founded the modern
passion for school reform.” – Paul Berman
“Paul Goodman, a man deeply dissatisfied with things as they are,
deserves more attention than other less-conscientious
objectors….His book is a highly serious effort to understand the
relation between society and the disaffected youngster.” – John K.
Galbraith, The New York Times
“Goodman might be called an intuitive sociologist in his
unconventional, erratic yet convincing analysis of the
encouragement toward human waste that our wasteful society
provides. Growing Up Absurd is his cruelly apt phrase for this
fatal lack of purpose and idealism. If [John] Updike’s anxiety for
his fellow man is subtle, Goodman’s angry polemic leaves us no
doubt what makes Rabbit run.” – The Washington Post, 1960
“His impact is all around us.” – Noam Chomsky
“Philosopher, poet, sociologist, pacifist, psychologist, writer,
anarchist, open bisexual and spokesman for a generation. Paul
Goodman ranked among the most influential thinkers in the latter
half of the 20th century.” – Ronnie Scheib, Variety
“[The film] “Paul Goodman Changed My Life” pays tribute to a
man—poet teacher social critic, guru without portfolio—whose name
was once a household word and whose books were talismans of
intellectual seriousness and social concern. His current obscurity
is something this documentary, directed by Jonathan Lee and
including eloquent testimony from friends, family and admirers, is
determined to overcome….His most famous book, Growing Up Absurd,
originally commissioned as a study of juvenile delinquency and
later a bible of the 1960s student rebellion, remains essential and
troubling reading for anyone who cares about the problems of the
young.” – A.O. Scott, The New York Times, 10/19/11, from his review
of the film "Paul Goodman Changed My Life"
“Mr. Goodman is terrifying. Utopians usually are when we take them
(or they take themselves) seriously. And Goodman is all the
more terrifying because he is a rational Utopian who has most of
analytical apparatus and theoretical formulations of modern
sociology, psychology, historiography and aesthetics at his finger
tips.” – Webster Scott, The Nation
“The best analysis I have seen of the spiritual emptiness of our
technological paradise.” – Sir Herbert Read
“Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd is an extraordinary good and
important book—the best book I know on the subject of
youth….Goodman’s is a serious, profound and old-fashionedly moral
book. With great originality and lucidity, he argues that the
Organization Man, the beat and the juvenile delinquent are merely
reactions to the same basic problem….” – Kenneth Keniston, The
American Scholar
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