True, he was an anarchist, draft dodger, sexual liberationist (and confirmed bisexual), as well as den father to the New Left, but Paul Goodman still comes off sounding an awful lot like Mr. Chips. Talk about softspokenness, talk about lending a hand, talk about talking it out: Goodman is there for the “kids,” as he calls them, including the “resigned” beats and the “fatalistic” hoods, plus everybody else who’s going to wind up either dropping out or making Chevy tail fins on an assembly line. Humankind is innocent, loving, and creative, you dig? It’s the bureaucracies that create the evil, that make Honor and Community impossible, and it’s the kids who really take it in the groin. Thus goes the indictment of the American social and educational systems in Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960), the book that made him more than just another underground hero. But to get the whole picture, you’ll also have to plow through his poems, plays, novels, magazine pieces, and confessions; his treatises on linguistics, constitutional law, Gestalt therapy, Noh theater, and, with his brother, city planning; plus listen to him tell you about his analysis and all those sit-ins. A Renaissance man in an era that favored specialization, Goodman never lost his sense of wonder—or of outrage. And one more thing: If your parents used to try to get you to watch them “making love,” it may well have been on Goodman’s say-so.
RECOMMENDED READING: Growing Up Absurd, of course. And, if you liked that, The Empire City (1959), a novel with a hero perversely named Horatio Alger and a lambasting of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. Five Years: Thoughts in a Useless Time (1967), his journal of late-Fifties despair. And “May Pamphlet” (1945), a modern counterpart to Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” NORMAN MAILER (1923-)
Although he probably wouldn’t have wowed them at the Deux Magots, Mailer, in the American intellectual arena, is at least a middleweight. Beginning in the mid-Fifties, when he took time off from his pursuit of the Great American Novelist prize to write a weekly column for The Village Voice (which he co-founded), he was, for decades, our most visible social critic, purveyor of trends, attacker of ideologies, and promoter of the concept of the artist as public figure. Operating as a sort of superjournalist—even Mailer has never claimed to be a man of letters—he proceeded to define new waves of consciousness, from “hip” to the peace movement to feminism, just as (though never, as his detractors point out, before) they hit the cultural mainstream. Like a true New Journalist, he was forever jumping into the action, taking risks, playing with the language, and making sociological connections. Unlike other New Journalists, however, he came equipped with a liberal Jewish background, a Harvard education, considerable talent as a novelist, and enough ambition to make him emperor, if only he’d been a little less cerebral and a lot less self-destructive. By the late Sixties, he’d hit on the strategy (soon to become an MO) of using narcissism as a tool for observation and commentary, a device that seemed both to validate a decade or so of personal excess (drugs, drink, fistfights, and the much-publicized stabbing of his second wife) and to set him up as the intellectual successor to Henry Adams. Later, he got himself into debt, wrote second-rate coffee-table books, launched an unsuccessful campaign for the mayoralty of New York City, married too many women, sired too many children, made too many belligerent remarks on TV talk shows, got behind one of the worst causes célèbres ever (Jack Abbott), spent a decade writing a “masterpiece” no one could read (Ancient Evenings) and another decade writing a spy story no one had time to read (Harlot’sGhost, 1,310 pages, and that’s only part one), and generally exhausted everyone’s patience—and that goes double for anyone even remotely connected with the women’s movement. Still, it’s worth remembering that, as Time magazine put it, “for a heady period, no major event in U.S. life seemed quite complete until Mailer had observed himself observing it.” Plus, he did marry that nice redhead and finally started behaving himself at parties. Most important, it’s hard to think of anyone who managed to explore the nature of celebrity in the media age from so many different angles—and lived to tell the tale.
RECOMMENDED READING: Advertisements for Myself (1959), a collection of combative essays and mean-spirited criticism of fellow writers, which marked the beginning of Mailer’s notoriety; read it for the two acknowledged masterpieces: “The White Negro” and “The Time of Her Time.” Armies of the Night (1968), Mailer’s account of the anti–Vietnam War march on Washington; his most widely read nonfiction book and the debut of the narrator-as-center-of-the-universe format. Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1969), more of the same, only different; an attempt to penetrate to the heart—or lack thereof—of the Republican and Democratic conventions. The Executioner’s Song (1979), the Pulitzer Prize–winning saga of convinced murderer Gary Gilmore; Mailer’s comeback after all those coffee-table books and, as one critic suggested, his single foray into punk literature. NOAM CHOMSKY (1928-)
For the better part of two decades served as the conscience of a nation. From the earliest days of the Vietnam War, he spearheaded resistance against the American presence in Southeast Asia, chiding the fancy, amoral policy makers in Washington, the technocrats of the military-industrial complex, and the “liberal intelligentsia,” especially those members of it charged with making sense of what was really happening, at the Pentagon as in the Mekong Delta. (It was the media’s failure to tell the whole story—and its implications, including the racism and arrogance inherent in First World imperialism—that arguably annoyed him most.) No shrinking violet, he maintained, for instance, back when Henry Kissinger was up for a Columbia professorship, that the former secretary of state and professional éminence grise was fit to head only a “Department of Death.” And he wasn’t just talk: In peace march after peace march you could count on spotting him in the front lines.
Meanwhile, he somehow managed to function as an MIT linguistics professor, and, in fairly short order, became indisputably the most influential linguist of the second half of the century. Chomsky’s most famous theory concerns something he called generative—a.k.a. transformational—grammar, in which he argued that the degree of grammatical similarity manifested by the languages of the world, coupled with the ease with which little children learn to speak them, suggested that man’s capacity for language, and especially for grammatical structure, is innate, as genetically determined as eye color or left-handedness. The proof: All of us constantly (and painlessly) use sequences and combinations of words that we’ve never heard before, much less consciously learned. Chomsky singlehandedly managed to bring linguistics front and center, transforming it—you should pardon the expression—from an academic specialty practiced among moribund Indian tribes and sleepy college sophomores into the subject of heated debate among epistemologists, behavioral psychologists, and the French. Naturally, he accumulated his share of detractors in the process. Some complained that he made the human consciousness sound suspiciously like a home computer; others noted that he never really defined what he meant by “deep structure,” the psychic system from which our spoken language is generated and of which any sentence or group of sentences is in some way a map.