Growing Up Absurd : Problems of Youth in the Organized Society

Goodman, Paul; Blake, Casey Nelson (FRW); Sontag, Susan (CON)

ISBN 10: 1590175816 / ISBN 13: 9781590175811

Published by NYRB Classics, 2012

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 18541868-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Growing Up Absurd : Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590175816
• ISBN 13: 9781590175811
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd was a runaway bestseller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the nascent New Left. Goodman, at the time well into middle age, was a maverick anarchist 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 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. <br /> Growing Up Absurd takes the crisis of disaffected youth as indicative of the crisis within the culture at large, which Goodman describes as being run by corporations that provide employment (when they do) but not work in any meaningful sense, work that engages body and soul. Disaffected youth was in this sense at the forefront of a disruption of a social order that was, if not directly politically repressive, humanly repressive, stifling the real human potential that, surely, a good society would serve to unleash, encourage, and pass on.

About the Author

PAUL GOODMAN (1911-1972) was an American social critic, psychologist, poet, novelist, and anarchist who was a frequent contributor to such journals as Politics, Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books. He published widely in a variety of fields-including city planning, Gestalt therapy, educational reform, literary criticism, and politics-before writing Growing Up Absurd, which in 1960 became an enormous bestseller.<br /> SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004) was the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.<br /> CASEY NELSON BLAKE is Founding Director of the American Studies Program and Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author or editor of several works, including The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State.