‘Picking Fights and Dropping Names’ – NY Times 3-19-2017
‘Norman Podhoretz Still Picks Fights’ – NY Times 3-19-2017
An excellent article in today’s New York Times, “Norman Podhoretz Still Picks Fights and Drops Names” by John Leland — about the neoconservative pundit and former Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz — notes that Podhoretz, after becoming Editor-in-Chief of Commentary in 1960, enlivened the magazine and hired writers on the left such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Paul Goodman, and Norman O. Brown.
This brought to mind the name of Goodman.
Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was an American novelist, playwright, poet, literary critic, and psychotherapist who is best remembered as a social critic and anarchist philosopher. His most famous work was Growing Up Absurd (1960), which was originally serialized in Commentary and which was finally published (after being rejected by publishers numerous times) with the assistance of Podhoretz.
Growing Up Absurd was a best seller and an enormously influential book in certain circles when I was in high school. It seemed that all of my liberal, intellectually advanced peers — and liberal, progressive adults who were sympathetic to their ideas — were reading it. The book saw the disaffection of my generation — youths coming of age in the early 1960’s — as rooted in the evils inherent in what he called “the disgrace of the Organised System”: semi-monopolies, government, advertising, etc.
