Tom Kromer (1906–1969)
Auteur van Waiting for Nothing and Other Writings
Over de Auteur
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 toon meer 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 toon minder
Werken van Tom Kromer
Gerelateerde werken
Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writings of the 1930's (1967) — Medewerker — 39 exemplaren
Tagged
Algemene kennis
Leden
Besprekingen
Misschien vindt je deze ook leuk
Gerelateerde auteurs
Statistieken
- Werken
- 3
- Ook door
- 1
- Leden
- 84
- Populariteit
- #216,911
- Waardering
- 4.1
- Besprekingen
- 3
- ISBNs
- 15
- Talen
- 3
- Favoriet
- 1
It’s the 1930s of course, there’s mass-unemployment all across Depression-era America, and no work of even the most basic, menial or temporary kind to be had anywhere. It’s also winter, freezing, and people are reduced to begging for pennies to scrape enough together for a hot meal. Alternatively there’s the silent humiliation of standing in a block-long soup-line for hours on end, to be given “a bucket of slop and a stale loaf” (even the soup is almost inedible: rancid carrot-soup made from rotting carrots). It’s not just single men either; there are women out here too, women with children, with babies even, babies starving for want of milk—whole families living this real-life Hell.
Tom Kromer was born in 1906 in West Virginia. After a conventional-enough early life (college, then a spell teaching) in late 1928 he was commissioned by a newspaper (the Huntingdon Herald-Despatch) to give its readers a taste of the Great Depression, then in its early stages, by going out on to the streets begging. A few months after the article was printed, suddenly finding himself out of a job (and money), he jumped a freight-train and went back out there for real this time. Five years later Waiting for Nothing (published 1935) was an account of his experiences. It’s not a story, but a series of scenes—which he claimed to be mostly autobiographical—describing life at the bottom, life “on the fritz” (= on the road, broke and out of work). The style is as plain as it gets, absolutely no frills at all, and with much 1930s slang: “I have seen one bull kick a hundred stiffs off a drag” (= I have seen one bastard of a blackjack-wielding cop single-handedly kick a hundred cowed, hungry, unemployed men off a train). The result is stark, almost as if written in black-and-white. I think you could put it alongside Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and George Orwell’s Down and Out…, but this is more like the former than the latter—here people often go days at a time without food or shelter of any kind.
Although the book itself was a success, Kromer never completed another and, in the end, gave up writing altogether—I think maybe he’d put all he had to give into this one. The impression I also get is that Waiting for Nothing has been neglected, overlooked in recent decades, which is a pity. Above all, it brought home to me that the overwhelming majority of the people on its pages weren’t feckless or lazy, stupid or useless; they were people like you and me: average, ordinary, but just unbelievably unlucky to be living in the wrong place at absolutely, catastrophically, the wrong time. It could have been any of us.… (meer)