Goodman was an active bisexual who cruised bars and parks for young men. He was fired from his teaching position there for not taking his cruising off-campus. He was dismissed from the Partisan Review, the progressive boarding school Manumit, and Black Mountain College for reasons related to his sexuality. Goodman was known for his paradoxical identity and contrarian stances. 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. Growing Up Absurd professes his belief in the simultaneous paramountcy of both radical individuation and communalism. He believed in liberating coalitions but broke from black power and gay rights movements or coalitions whose collective power diminished individual autonomy. He loved to shock 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. In his life, Goodman's professed egalitarianism and humanism sometimes clashed with his personal pretensions, intellectual arrogance, and "impatient imperviousness". While admirable that Goodman stuck to his unfashionable conviction, Irving Howe wrote, Goodman also had an air of "asphyxiating self-righteousness". Goodman's unmannered physical presence was a core piece of his presentation and idiosyncratic celebrity as a social gadfly, partly since Goodman himself championed a lack of separation between public and private lives. Legacy In his time, Goodman was the foremost American intellectual within non-Marxist, Western radicalism, but he did not fit neatly into categories within the intellectual community. Though he wrote learnedly on topics spanning 21 different sections of the New York Public Library by the time of his death, he went largely unaccepted in these disciplines, owing partly to his resistance to specialize, his ornery personality, and his unrefined writing quality. His work went unrecognized in academic canon. As literary critic Kingsley Widmer put it, Goodman had not produced a singular masterwork. Writing on Goodman's death, Susan Sontag described his intellect as underappreciated and his literary voice as the most "convincing, genuine, [and] singular" since D. H. Lawrence's. She lamented how "Goodman was always taken for granted even by his admirers", praised his literary breadth, and predicted that his poetry would eventually find widespread appreciation. Sontag called Goodman the "most important American writer" of her last