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Those days as an educational vagabond ended when McKeon, by then a dean at the University of Chicago, invited him to lecture on English literature. In 1940, however, Goodman was fired because of his freely admitted homosexuality, which later also cost him a teaching job at Black Mountain. "I don't think that people's sexual lives are any business of the state," he declared some years afterward. "To license sex is absurd." Indeed, although he and his wife Sally lived together for 30 years and had two children, they never formally married.
Goodman underwent psychotherapy in the late 1940s and early 1950s, an experience that led him to become a lay psychotherapist. Nevertheless, the later 1950s were filled with despair. Even after publishing a dozen books and hundreds of articles, he wrote, "I am continually tormented by not being published ... I guess I'm the least-known author of my ability in America. This has made me bitter enough at times, yet I also take it as a good sign, that what I stand for is important and resisted.
"Most of my intellectual generation sold out," he mused, "first to the Communists and then to the organized system, so that there are very few independents around that a young man can accept as a hero." Goodman, however, provided the young with an indictment in Growing Up Absurd: "Our abundant society is at present simply deficient in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and worthwhile goals that could make growing up possible. It is lacking in enough man's work ... in honest public speech ... in the opportunity to be useful. It corrupts the fine arts. It shackles science. It dampens animal ardor. It dims the sense that there is a Creation."
Necessities of Life. Goodman's solutions were often visionary, even outlandish, but some were the forerunners of today's social programs. Long before some psychiatric reformers advocated closing down the old-style mental institutions, Goodman argued that the inmates should be allowed to roam the countryside as "local eccentrics or loonies." Years before Richard Nixon, among others, proposed a guaranteed minimum income, Goodman urged that the necessities of life—food, shelter, clothing, medical care—be provided free to everyone. The state would require that a citizen give six years of his life to producing those goods, then allow him to do what he wanted for the remainder. Despite these ideas Goodman never saw himself as a radical. "I've always thought tearing things up by the roots was senseless," he said. "I've always been a conservative anarchist."
In his most recently published article, Goodman asked only "that the children have bright eyes, the river be clean, food and sex be available, and nobody be pushed around" and, for himself, "that I can live on a little." He had suffered two heart attacks in the past year and refused his doctor's advice to stay in a hospital. Until his death last week at the age of 60, he insisted upon following a daily schedule of gardening on his farm in North Stratford, N.H., visiting with friends and writing—a book on religion and a collection of poems. "He wasn't a man to follow prescriptions," his doctor said. "He had too much to do."