Richard Goodman

Escaping the sound and fury of New York, Richard Goodman moved to a small village in Provence, near Avignon.  There he found a tiny plot of streamside land and set about raising a copious vegetable garden that eventually connected him to his village and to the villagers in ways he never would have dreamed.  

Richard Goodman decides he wants to escape New York one Saturday to go hiking.  It's harder than he thinks.  "In the Woods, in the Dark," tells what happened.  

Wearied and dissatisfied with his job as a waiter in a fourth rate restaurant, the author suddenly takes it upon himself to ask for a job in a French restaurant as a cook. Edmond Landrier—the Man in White—grants him his wish and proceeds to teach him marvelous things.

For years, people have asked Richard why he lives in New York.  The question has often been put bluntly, as a statement: "I don't see how you can live there."  Well, here's the answer, "Why I Live in New York," published in Pilgrimage, first and second part.

Over a period of months, Richard Goodman visits an older woman living in Greenwich Village, Lavinia Russ, who talks to him about life, death and the desire to murder her husband.  This is the story of "A Big Wonderful Tree Falling Down," which was published in Ascent.

After September 11th, Richard Goodman began riding his bicycle down from his apartment on the Upper West Side in New York City to the World Trade Center Disaster site, or as near to it as he could get.  When he came back, he wrote about what he saw. "The Bicycle Diaries," published in the Louisville Review, is the result.

Thirty-five years ago, Richard Goodman spent an evening with William Burroughs in his London flat.  Burroughs talked about Naked Lunch, Terry Southern, Jean Genet, Norman Mailer, and his years in Mexico as a host of friends came and went.

The author's beloved Raleigh three-speed bicycle is stolen one dark day, and he writes an elegy for the New York Times Op-Ed page.