Collected Stories
3 total works
In these stories and sketches, written when he was establishing himself as a young man of letters in Greenwich Village, plot, character, and setting are secondary to the narrator’s criticism of American life and insights into personal psychology—this is fiction as the record of an inward search toward hard-won self-understanding.
A collection of Goodman’s short fiction that contains many of his best-known stories, including the much-anthologized Our Visit To Niagara and Adam. Goodman explores the archetype of the divided self Theseus and the Minotaur, man and boy, Adam in exile and Adam in the Garden and attempts to reconcile the two.
These twenty-four stories some traditional and realistic, others experimental and “cubist” were written when Goodman was in his late twenties, a student at the University of Chicago living the life of a romantic artist-outsider. They reveal a rebel at odds with American institutions yet also homesick for his native New York, the pleasures of family, and the comforts of a strong moral order.