Paul Goodman and the Old New Left

I'm still puzzled fifty years later by what it was about the climate and the culture in 1960 that encouraged many young people to think they could make the world over. That was the year when little groups of black students brought down entrenched segregation by putting their bodies over lines they weren't supposed to cross. In that same year, students rose up en masse in Turkey, South Korea, and Japan; a host of African countries declared their independence from colonial rule; John Kennedy became the first person born in the twentieth century to take over the U.S. presidency; Bobby Zimmerman started to perform as Bob Dylan. A strong sense of youth rebellion and generational cleavage was emerging, and it was in that year that Paul Goodman succeeded in publishing Growing Up Absurd.