Waiting for Nothing and Other Writings (PDF)

<p>In <i>&quot;Waiting for Nothing&quot; and Other Writings</i>, 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.<i>Waiting for Nothing</i>, 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 &quot;three hots and a flop&quot;&mdash;food and a place to sleep. Kromer scans, in first-person voice, the scattered events, the stultifying sameness, of &quot;life on the vag&quot;&mdash;the encounters with cops, the window panes that separate hunger and a &quot;feed,&quot; the bartering with prostitutes and homosexuals.</p><p>In &quot;Michael Kohler,&quot; 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, &quot;Michael Kohler&quot; 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 &quot;Pity the Poor Panhandler: $2 an Hour Is All He Gets,&quot; to the sensitive pieces of his later life&mdash;short stories, articles, and book reviews written more out of an aching understanding of suffering than from the slick formulas of politics.</p><p><i>Waiting for Nothing</i> remains, however, Kromer's most powerful achievement, a work Steffens called &quot;realism to the nth degree.&quot; Collected here as the major part of Kromer's oeuvre, <i>Waiting for Nothing</i> traces the author's personal struggle to preserve human virtues and emotions in the face of a brutal and dehumanizing society.</p>