In "Waiting for Nothing" and Other Writings, the works of the
depression-era writer Tom Kromer are collected for the first time
into a volume that depicts with searing realism life on the bum in
the 1930s and, with greater detachment, the powerless frustration
of working-class people often too locked in to know their
predicament.Waiting for Nothing, Kromer's only completed novel, is
largely autobiographical and was written at a Civilian Conservation
Corps camp in California. It tells the story of one man drifting
through America, east coast to west, main stem to side street,
endlessly searching for "three hots and a flop" food and a place to
sleep. Kromer scans, in first-person voice, the scattered events,
the stultifying sameness, of "life on the vag" the encounters with
cops, the window panes that separate hunger and a "feed," the
bartering with prostitutes and homosexuals. In "Michael Kohler,"
Kromer's unfinished novel, the harsh existence of coal miners in
Pennsylvania is told in a committed, political voice that reveals
Kromer's developing affinity with leftist writers including Lincoln
Steffens and Theodore Dreiser. An exploration of Kromer's
proletarian roots, "Michael Kohler" was to be a political novel, a
story of labor unions and the injustices of big management.
Kromer's other work ranges from his college days, when he wrote a
sarcastic expose of the bums in his hometown titled "Pity the Poor
Panhandler: $2 an Hour Is All He Gets," to the sensitive pieces of
his later life short stories, articles, and book reviews written
more out of an aching understanding of suffering than from the
slick formulas of politics. Waiting for Nothing remains, however,
Kromer's most powerful achievement, a work Steffens called "realism
to the nth degree." Collected here as the major part of Kromer's
oeuvre, Waiting for Nothing traces the author's personal struggle
to preserve human virtues and emotions in the face of a brutal and
dehumanizing society.
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