Paul Goodman

Paul Goodman, known in his day as "the philosopher of the New Left," set the agenda for the youth movement of the 1960s with his bestselling Growing Up Absurd. He produced new books every year throughout that turbulent decade, while lectuing to hundreds of audiences on the nation's campuses, covering subjects that ranged from movement politics to education and community planning, from psychotherapy and religion to literature and media. At the same time, a continuous stream of poems, plays, and fiction prompted composer and diarist Ned Rorem to say, "In a society increasingly specialized, he shone as a Renaissance artist." America's most celebrated public intellectual at the time of his death in 1972, his work still resonates for our own times of national crisis.