In a new initiative, PM Press and Goodman's literary exuctor, Taylor Stoerh have gathered nine core texts by the truely libertarian, seminal thinker. Included are the utopian essays and proposals which inspired the dissident youth of the 1960s, influencing theory so deeply that are now perceived as underlying assumptions of contemporary radicalism. A potent antidote to US imperialism with analyses of civil disobedience, decentralism and anarchy.
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 lecturing 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.
Taylor Stoehr, Paul Goodman's friend and literary executor, has edited many volumes of his fiction, poetry, and social commentary. Among his numerous studies of Goodman's career, his book Here Now Next tells the story of how today's widespread Gestalt movement grew out of cross-fertilizing conversations between Goodman, the theorist, and Fritz and Lore Perls, the practitioners, of a daring new therapeutic experiment. Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Stoehr has written many other books of literary and cultural criticism, translated two collections of poetry, and is author of the forthcoming Changing Lives: Working with Literature in an Alternative Sentencing Program.