improving America. He read the founding fathers and resolved to write patriotic social criticism that would appeal to his fellow citizens rather than criticize from the sidelines. Throughout the late 1950s, Goodman continued to publish in journals including Commentary, Dissent, Liberation (for which he became an unofficial editor), and The Kenyon Review. The Empire City was published in 1959. His work had brought little money or fame up to this point. It was a low point of his life that would soon change dramatically. Social criticism 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. Released to moderate acclaim, it became the major book by which 1960s American youth understood themselves. 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. 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. In contrast to contemporaneous mores, Goodman praised traditional, simple values, such as honor, faith, and vocation, and the humanist history of art and heroes as providing hope for a more meaningful society. Goodman's frank vindications and outsider credentials resonated with the young. Throughout the sixties, Goodman would direct his work towards them as a father figure. Impressed by his personal integrity and the open defiance by which he lived his life, they came to regard him as a model for free life in a bureaucratic country and he came to regarded himself as their Dutch uncle. He spoke regularly on college campuses, discussing tactics with students, and seeking to cultivate youth movements, such as Students for a Democratic Society and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, that would take up his political message. As an early ally, he had a particular affinity for the Berkeley movement, which he identified as anarchist in character. Goodman became known both as the movement's philosopher and as "the philosopher of the New Left". While he continued to write for "little magazines", Goodman now reached mainstream audiences and began to make money. Multiple publishers were engaged in reissuing his books, reclaiming his backlog of unpublished fiction, and publishing his new social commentary. He continued to publish at least a book a year for