Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war.

As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.

He co-wrote the theory behind Gestalt therapy based on Wilhelm Reich's radical Freudianism and held psychoanalytic sessions through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.

[1][4] Their mother worked as a women's clothes traveling saleswoman, which left Goodman to be raised mostly by his aunts and sister in New York City's[1] Washington Heights with petty bourgeois values.

[5] He started at City College of New York the same year, where he majored in philosophy, was influenced by philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, and found both lifelong friends and his intellectual social circle].

[13] Apart from teaching gigs at New York University night school and a summer at Black Mountain College, the family lived in poverty on his wife's salary.

[13] He returned to his writing and therapy practice in New York City in 1951[13] and received his Ph.D. in 1954 from the University of Chicago, whose press published his dissertation as The Structure of Literature the same year.

[21] Goodman's 1960 study of alienated youth in America, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream cultural theorist and pillar of leftist thought during the counterculture.

[21] The book of social criticism assured the young that they were right to feel disaffected about growing up into a society without meaningful community, spirit, sex, or work.

[22] He proposed alternatives in topics across the humanist spectrum from family, school, and work, through media, political activism, psychotherapy, quality of life, racial justice, and religion.

He continued to publish at least a book a year for the rest of his life,[20] including critiques of education (The Community of Scholars and Compulsory Miseducation), a treatise on decentralization (People or Personnel), a "memoir-novel" (Making Do), and collections of poetry, sketch stories, and previous articles.

[38][4] Indeed, Goodman's poetry, fiction, drama, literary criticism, urban planning, psychological, cultural, and educational theory addressed the theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, especially the responsibility to exercise free action and creativity.

[4] While his fiction and poetry was noted in his time, following Growing Up Absurd's success, he diverted his attention from literature and spent his final decade pursuing the social and cultural criticism that forms the basis of his legacy.

"[42] George Orwell's classic essay on poor writing, Politics and the English Language, notably rebukes an example of Goodman's rhapsodic, jargon-heavy psychoanalytic prose.

[45][46] When criticized for prioritizing breadth over depth, Goodman would reply that his interests did not break neatly into disciplines and that his works concerned the common topics of human nature and community as derived from his concrete experience.

[48] Goodman was prolific in sharing specific ideas for improving society to match his aims,[49] and actively advocated for them in frequent lectures, letters, op-eds, and media appearances.

His experience in marginal subcommunities, small anarchist publications, and bohemian New York City through the 1940s formed his core, radical principles, such as decentralization and pacifism.

[51] He resolved to write positively, patriotically, and accessibly about reform for a larger audience rather than simply resisting conformity and "drawing the line" between himself and societal pressures.

[20] Even as American activism grew increasingly violent in the late 1960s, Goodman retained hope that a new populism, almost religious in nature, would bring about a consensus to live more humanely.

[54] His "peasant anarchism" was less dogma than disposition: he held that the small things in life (little property, food, sex) were paramount, while power worship, central planning, and ideology were perilous.

He rejected grand schemes to reorganize the world[35] and instead argued for decentralized counter-institutions across society to downscale societal organization[30] into small, community-based units that better served immediate needs.

[39] Goodman's role as a New York Intellectual cultural figure was satirized alongside his coterie in Delmore Schwartz's The World Is a Wedding[67] and namechecked in Woody Allen's Annie Hall.

The therapy is based in finding and confronting unresolved issues in one's habitual behavior and social environment to become a truer, more self-aware version of oneself.

These themes, of present engagement and of duty to identify shared ills, provided a theory of human nature and community that became the political basis of Goodman's New Left vision and subsequent career in social criticism.

[80] Goodman contended that a lack of community, patriotism, and honor stunts the normal development of human nature and leads to "resigned or fatalistic" youth.

[90] He was, at once, an iconoclastic anarchist and a "neolithic conservative", a figurehead of the political left and regularly critical of it, an everyman who roamed New York for sex and handball and a self-described defender of Western civilization who held Aristotle and Kropotkin as his forebears.

[91] He loved to shock[92] and his aggressive, cunning argumentative style tended towards polemics and explaining both how his interlocutor was completely wrong and from which basics they should begin anew.

[97] Though he wrote learnedly on topics spanning 21 different sections of the New York Public Library by the time of his death,[4] he went largely unaccepted in these disciplines, owing partly to his resistance to specialization,[96] his ornery personality,[98] and his unrefined writing quality.

[105] Some of Goodman's ideas have been assimilated into mainstream thought: local community autonomy and decentralization, better balance between rural and urban life, morality-led technological advances, break-up of regimented schooling, art in mass media, and a culture less focused on a wasteful standard of living.

[108] His systemic societal critique was adopted by 1960s New Left radicals,[109] and his Growing Up Absurd changed American public dialogue to focus "on the discontents of the young and the lack of humane values in much of our technocracy".