Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly--he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things--and the book's surprise success established him as one of America's most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words.
For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of...

Painting a vivid picture of 1960s counterculture ideas, this new collection of the late Paul Goodman's essential anarchist writingsfrom utopian essays to practical proposalsreveals how he inspired the dissident youth of the era and profoundly influenced movement theory and practice. Long out-of-print, these provocative, insightful, and incisive pieces analyze citizenship and civil disobedience, decentralization and the organized systemall while still mindful of the long anarchist tradition and of the Jeffersonian democracy that resonated strongly in Goodman's own political thought. A potent...