performed well in literature and languages during his time at Townsend Harris Hall High School and graduated atop his class in 1927. 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. Goodman came to identify with "community anarchism" since reading Peter Kropotkin as an undergraduate, and kept the affiliation throughout his life. He graduated with a bachelor's in 1931, early in the Great Depression. As an aspiring writer, Goodman wrote and published poems, essays, stories, and a play while living with his sister Alice, who supported him. Only a few were published. He did not keep a regular job, but read scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and taught drama at a Zionist youth camp during the summers 1934 through 1936. Unable to afford tuition, Goodman audited graduate classes at Columbia University and traveled to some classes at Harvard University. When Columbia philosophy professor Richard McKeon moved to the University of Chicago, he invited Goodman to attend and lecture. Between 1936 and 1940, Goodman was a graduate student in literature and philosophy, a research assistant, and part-time instructor. He took his preliminary exams in 1940, but was forced out for "nonconformist sexual behavior", a charge that would recur multiple times in his teaching career. By this point of his life, Goodman was married and continued to cruise for young men, as an active bisexual. Homesick and absent his doctorate, Goodman returned to writing in New York City, where he was affiliated with the literary avant-garde. Goodman worked on his dissertation, though it would take 14 years to publish. Unable to find work as a teacher, he reviewed films in Partisan Review and in the next two years, published his first book of poetry (1941) and novel (The Grand Piano, 1942). He taught at Manumit, a progressive boarding school, in 1943 and 1944, but was let go for "homosexual behavior". Partisan Review too removed Goodman for his bisexuality and draft resistance advocacy. (Goodman himself was deferred and rejected from the World War II draft.) World War II politicized Goodman from an avant-garde author into a vocal pacifist and decentralist. His exploration of anarchism led him to publish in the libertarian journals of New York's Why? Group and Dwight Macdonald's Politics. Goodman's collected anarchist essays from this period, "The May Pamphlet",