His father and mother, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called him ever-so-formally Abbott Hoffman. To the otherwise staid publisher of his 1969 manifesto, Revolution for the Hell of It, his nom de plume was simply "Free"—a euphonic gesture that made its author an archetypal American. For giving one's self a new name tagged a new identity, a white man's monosyllable that was the equivalent of the X that Malcolm Little bestowed upon himself. Environmentalists in New York knew him as Barry Freed, a community organizer who was prominent enough to meet with Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. In E.L. Doctorow's searing novel of intergenerational radical politics among American Jews, The Book of Daniel (1971), he is the inspiration for the antic "Artie Sternlicht," who is introduced in the presence of assorted street people, plus an interviewer from Cosmopolitan magazine: "He talks fast in a gravel voice that breaks appealingly on punch lines. He jumps around as he raps, gesturing, acting out his words," as though personifying Tocqueville's image of the American who cannot converse; he orates.