Paul Goodman (September 9, 1911 – August 2, 1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and his draft resistance during World War II. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. His radicalism was rooted in psychological theory. He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream, antiestablishment cultural theorist. Goodman became known as "the philosopher of the New Left" and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. Despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life. Goodman is remembered for his utopian proposals and principled belief in human potential.
Goodman was born in New York City on September 9, 1911, to Augusta and Barnette Goodman. His Sephardic Jewish ancestors had emigrated to New York from Germany a century before the great wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe that began in the late 19th century. His grandfather had fought in the American Civil War, and the family was "relatively prosperous". Goodman's insolvent father abandoned the family prior to his birth, making Paul their fourth and last child, after Alice (1902–1969) and Percival (1904–1989). Their mother worked as a women's clothes traveling saleswoman, which left young Paul to be raised mostly by his aunts and sister in New York City's Washington Heights, with petty bourgeois values.
Goodman attended Hebrew school as well as the city's public schools, where he performed well and developed a strong affinity with Manhattan. He excelled in literature and languages during his time at Townsend Harris Hall High School, graduating atop his class in 1927. He enrolled at City College of New York that year, where he studied classical literature, majored in philosophy, was influenced by the Jewish philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, and found both lifelong friends and his intellectual social circle. Goodman came to identify with "community anarchism" after reading Peter Kropotkin as an undergraduate, and retained that affiliation throughout his life. He graduated from City College with a bachelor's degree in 1931, early in the Great Depression.
As an aspiring writer, Goodman wrote and published poems, essays, stories, and a play while living with his sister Alice, who supported him. Only a few of these were published. He did not keep a regular job, but read scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and taught drama at a Zionist youth summer camp from 1934 through 1936. Unable to afford tuition, Goodman audited graduate classes at Columbia University, and traveled to some classes at Harvard University. When Columbia philosophy professor Richard McKeon moved to the University of Chicago, he invited Goodman to attend and lecture. Between 1936 and 1940, Goodman was a graduate student in literature and philosophy, a research assistant, and part-time instructor. He took his preliminary exams in 1940, but was forced out for "nonconformist sexual behavior", a charge that would recur multiple times in his teaching career. By this point of his life, Goodman was married and continued to cruise for young men, as an active bisexual.
Homesick and absent his doctorate, Goodman returned to writing in New York City, where he was affiliated with the literary avant-garde. Goodman worked on his dissertation, though it would take 14 years to publish. Unable to find work as a teacher, he reviewed films in Partisan Review and in the next two years, published his first book of poetry (1941) and novel (The Grand Piano, 1942). He taught at Manumit, a progressive boarding school, in 1943 and 1944, but was let go for "homosexual behavior". Partisan Review too removed Goodman for his bisexuality and draft resistance advocacy. (Goodman himself was deferred and rejected from the World War II draft.)
Career as writer and exploration of psychotherapy
World War II politicized Goodman from an avant-garde author into a vocal pacifist and decentralist. His exploration of anarchism led him to publish in the libertarian journals of New York's Why? Group and Dwight Macdonald's Politics. Goodman's collected anarchist essays from this period, "The May Pamphlet", undergird the libertarian social criticism he would pursue for the rest of his life.
Aside from anarchism, the late 1940s marked Goodman's expansion into psychoanalytic therapy and urban planning. In 1945, Goodman started a second common-law marriage that would last until his death. Apart from teaching gigs at New York University night school and a summer at Black Mountain College, the family lived in poverty on his wife's salary. By 1946, Goodman was a popular yet "marginal" figure in New York bohemia, and he began to participate in psychoanalytic therapy with Alexander Lowen. Through contact with the eminent analyst Wilhelm Reich, he began a self-psychoanalysis. Around the same time, Goodman and his brother, the architect Percival, wrote Communitas (1947). It argued that rural and urban living had not been functionally integrated and became known as a major work of urban planning following Goodman's eventual celebrity.
Fritz Perls and his wife Lore contacted Goodman after reading his writings on Reich, and began a friendship that yielded the Gestalt therapy movement. Goodman authored the theoretical chapter of their co-written 1951 book Gestalt Therapy. During the early 1950s, he continued with his psychoanalytic sessions and began his own occasional, unlicensed practice. He continued in this occupation through 1960, taking patients, running groups, and leading classes at the Gestalt Therapy Institutes.
During this psychoanalytic period, Goodman continued to consider himself foremost an artist and wrote prolifically even as his lack of wider recognition weathered his resolve. Before starting with Gestalt therapy, Goodman published the novel State of Nature, the book of anarchist and aesthetic essays Art and Social Nature, and the academic monograph Kafka's Prayer. He spent 1948 and 1949 writing in New York and published The Break-Up of Our Camp, a short story collection, followed by two novels: the 1950 The Dead of Spring and the 1951 Parents' Day. He returned to his writing and therapy practice in New York City in 1951 and received his Ph.D. in 1954 from the University of Chicago, whose press published his dissertation as The Structure of Literature the same year. The Living Theatre staged his theatrical work.
Mid-decade, Goodman entered a life crisis when publishers did not want his epic novel The Empire City, a new lay therapist licensing law excluded Goodman, and his daughter contracted polio. He embarked to Europe in 1958 where, through reflections on American social ills and respect for Swiss patriotism, Goodman became zealously concerned with improving America. He read the founding fathers and resolved to write patriotic social criticism that would appeal to his fellow citizens rather than criticize from the sidelines. Throughout the late 1950s, Goodman continued to publish in journals including Commentary, Dissent, Liberation (for which he became an unofficial editor), and The Kenyon Review. The Empire City was published in 1959. His work had brought little money or fame up to this point. It was a low point of his life that would soon change dramatically.