He also achieved notoriety after the banning of a book he had written called Hagar Revelly, originally published in 1913.

Mencken wrote of this prudish state of affairs in 1917: The action of the novels of the Howells school goes on within four walls of painted canvas; they begin to shock once they describe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below stairs; they never penetrate beneath the flow of social concealments and urbanities to the passions that actually move men and women to their acts, and the great forces that circumscribe and condition personality.

So obvious a piece of reporting as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Robert Herrick’s Together makes a sensation; the appearance of a Jennie Gerhardt or a Hagar Revelly brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage.

[1]Goodman was apparently a licensed doctor in addition to his involvement in movie production, and he also worked for a time for Cosmopolitan Pictures, William Randolph Hearst's movie company, created to produce films for his mistress, Marion Davies.

In 1924 he was embroiled in what became a scandal as producer Thomas Ince died under mysterious circumstances after a party aboard Hearst's yacht the Oneida.