Growing up Absurd by Paul Goodman ... pretty much founded the modern passion for school reform.
—Paul Berman
Paul Goodman, a man deeply dissatisfied with things as they are, deserves more attention than other less-conscientious objectors.... His book is a highly serious effort to understand the relation between society and the disaffected youngster.
—John K. Galbraith, The New York Times
[Growing Up Absurd] is deeply concerned with the challenges of growing up in American society, using delinquent youth as a doorway into the reality that society was becoming, for most, a meaningless rat race…This is the kind of book that you’d see Don Draper pondering alone at the end of some episode of Mad Men. Yet, in many respects, the book truly does contain quite a bit that applies in 2023…A better sense of the social contract and more emphasis on vocation would be as much of an improvement now as ever. —Elizabeth Stice, Current
Goodman might be called an intuitive sociologist in his unconventional, erratic yet convincing analysis of the encouragement toward human waste that our wasteful society provides. Growing Up Absurd is his cruelly apt phrase for this fatal lack of purpose and idealism. If [John] Updike's anxiety for his fellow man is subtle, Goodman's angry polemic leaves us no doubt what makes Rabbit run.
—The Washington Post, 1960
Philosopher, poet, sociologist, pacifist, psychologist, writer, anarchist, open bisexual and spokesman for a generation. Paul Goodman ranked among the most influential thinkers in the latter half of the 20th century.
—Ronnie Scheib, Variety
[The film] Paul Goodman Changed My Life pays tribute to a man—poet teacher social critic, guru without portfolio—whose name was once a household word and whose books were talismans of intellectual seriousness and social concern. His current obscurity is something this documentary, directed by Jonathan Lee and including eloquent testimony from friends, family and admirers, is determined to overcome.... His most famous book, Growing Up Absurd, originally commissioned as a study of juvenile delinquency and later a bible of the 1960s student rebellion, remains essential and troubling reading for anyone who cares about the problems of the young.
—A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Mr. Goodman is terrifying. Utopians usually are when we take them (or they take themselves) seriously. And Goodman is all the more terrifying because he is a rational Utopian who has most of the analytical apparatus and theoretical formulations of modern sociology, psychology, historiography and aesthetics at his finger tips.
—Webster Scott, The Nation
The best analysis I have seen of the spiritual emptiness of our technological paradise.
—Sir Herbert Read
Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd is an extraordinarily good and important book—the best book I know on the subject of youth.... Goodman's is a serious, profound and old-fashionedly moral book. With great originality and lucidity, he argues that the Organization Man, the beat and the juvenile delinquent are merely reactions to the same basic problem....
—Kenneth Keniston, The American Scholar
