Crazy Hope and Finite Experience Final Essays of Paul Goodman

Biography

Taylor Stoehr, Ph.D., Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, is Paul Goodman's literary executor and biographer.  In addition to editing over a dozen volumes of Goodman's work, he has written five books and numerous articles on literary figures such as Dickens, Hawthorne, Lawrence, and Thoreau, as well as cultural studies on utopian communities and other "countercultural" experiments of ninteenth-century America. 

"Each time I read Stoehr's introductions to Goodman's works my admiration for his courage and honesty grows.  Paul would have praised him, a millenarian rather than a utopian, one who does not look forward to a future state of things that can be planned, but as an anarchist continuing to exist and act conserving the tradition of Thoreau."

- Ivan Illich, philosopher and social historian

"Goodman's frightening brilliance and integrity scared people, for his was the honesty of the moral man who saw things and connections with clarity that others did not even know were there.  Writers and thinkers have a vogue.  They are in fashion or forgotten.  If Goodman is forgotten, if his work is found only in ashheaps, it is where humanity will end up."

- Marcus Raskin, Professor, Graduate Program of Public Policy, George Washington University

"Paul Goodman looking back - the sensible citizen, who's read everything, untrammeled by party lines, still a stubborn anarchist pacifist, useful to the old (me) as he was practically useful once to the young (our children)."

- Grace Paley, writer and peace activist

"Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about.  He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time."

- Hayden Carruth, poet and essayist

"Paul Goodman was our mid-century's greatest American-language thinker-poet.  In a society increasingly specialized, he shone as a Renaissance artist: there was nothing in prose or verse he could not do well.  What a joy now to rediscover his original charm and wisdom."

- Ned Roren, composer and diarist