Tom Kromer

Tom Kromer (1906-1969) was an American writer known for his one novel, "Waiting for Nothing", a classic account of vagrant life during the thirties. Dedicated "to Jolene, who turned off the gas," the work is an intensely realistic account of life as a homeless man during the Great Depression. Straightforward, declarative sentences in the tough-guy argot of the time ("I admire that stiff. He has got the guts. He does not like parting with his dough") are characteristic of Kromer, as are spare descriptions of grim scenes ("When I look at these stiffs by the fire, I am looking at a graveyard. There is hardly room to move between the tombstones. . . . The epitaphs are chiseled in sunken shadows on their cheeks"). The settings include rescue missions, flop houses, abandoned buildings and the sidewalk outside a nice restaurant. In one nail-biting chapter, the narrator slowly comes to realize that the pitch-black boxcar he is riding in contains another rider, who is quietly, slowly, stalking him.

"Waiting for Nothing" was first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1935, reissued by Hill and Wang in 1968, and, in a definitive edition edited by Arthur D. Casciato and James L.W. West III, reprinted as "Waiting for Nothing and Other Writings" by the University of Georgia Press in 1986.