Waiting for Nothing and Other Writings [Paperback]

TOM KROMER (1906-1969), the son of an immigrant coal miner and a glass-factory worker, was born in Huntington, West Virginia. Forced by lack of funds to cut his college career short, Kromer headed west in a fruitless search for work in 1929. He spent the subsequent five years roaming America by rail, living the tenuous life of a bum. The ordeal ruined Kromer's health. He struggled with tuberculosis for the rest of his life, growing steadily more reclusive until his death.

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 othel³Ÿ