Growing Up Absurd: Problems Of Youth In The Organized System

Paul Goodman (9/9/11-8/2/72) was an American sociologist, poet, writer, anarchist, public intellectual & gay-rights activist. He's now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd & as an activist on the pacifist Left in the '60s & an inspiration to that era's student movement. He's less remembered as a cofounder of Gestalt Therapy in the '40s & '50s.In the mid-40s, together with C. Wright Mills, he contributed to Politics, a journal edited then by Dwight Macdonald. In '47, he published Kafka's Prayer & Communitas, a classic study of urban design coauthored with his brother Percival. Fame came only with the '60 publication of his Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. He also knew & worked with other leading NY intellectuals, including Daniel Bell, Norman Mailer, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Norman Podhoretz, Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling & Philip Rahv. His writings also appeared in Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, The New Leader, Dissent & NY Review of Books.Growing Up Absurd analyses the causes & effects of: the disgrace of the Organised System, of semimonopolies, government, advertisers etc. & the disaffection of the growing generation. Goodman asserts that the young really need a more worthwhile world in order to grow up at all, confronting this real need with the world that they've been getting.