A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties.
A Paul Goodman Reader
that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like
Growing Up Absurd
, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from
The Empire City
, a comic novel reviewers compared to
Don Quixote
, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America’s most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim,
“Not one dull page. It’s almost unbelievable.
”
Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.