Waiting For Nothing

This autobiographical novel, which has been out of print for many years, was originally published in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression. It tells the story of a young man, typical of thousands in the thirties, who is out of work and down on his luck in New York City. His life is a struggle for simple survival - how to find food, how to find shelter for the night. The preoccupation with staying alive in a seemingly indifferent world - days spent looking for handouts, nights spent in flophouses, missions, and jails - leads inevitably to humiliation, despair and spiritual defeat. Waiting for Nothing is a compelling human document - like Henry Roth's Call It Sleep and Jack Conroy's The Disinherited - which comes out of harsh, direct, personal experience, the experience of a decade in which the nation was nearly overcome by a sense of hopelessness and fear.