On a cold night in the early 1930s, a young West Virginian named Tom Kromer huddled in a railway boxcar as it rattled westward across the country.
Hungry, sleepless and surrounded by other men just trying to make it through the night, Tom braced himself against the trembling boxcar wall and scribbled a few observations on a scrap of paper.
Five years later, those notes — scrawled on Bull Durham papers, in the margins of religious tracts in a hundred rescue missions, upon wastepaper scavenged from the cluttered floors of county jails — would become Waiting for Nothing, Kromer’s raw, unflinching autobiographical novel that portrayed America’s dispossessed during the Great Depression.
From Huntington
Tom Kromer’s story begins in Huntington, WV, where he was born in 1906. His father, an immigrant who had spent his boyhood in the coal mines, died young from cancer.
His mother dreamed that her children would escape that hard life through education, and for a while, it looked as if Tom might. He attended Marshall College (later University) off and on, but never managed to finish. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Tom’s tuition ran dry and so did his prospects.
The real turning point came when Kromer left school and set out west, hoping for farm work.
Finding no work, Tom slipped into a life “on the fritz,” his phrase for years spent as a hobo moving from one town to the next from his West Virginia hills to the California coast. Unlike the romantic drifter of folklore, Kromer was, in his own words, “a tramp of circumstances.”
He begged, starved, took shelter where he could. It was not uncommon for him to go days without food. It was brutal. But it also gave him a voice unlike any other.
The Novel was Born
In 1935, he published his acclaimed novel Waiting for Nothing. Written in jagged, stark prose, it asked for no pity, offered no sentimentality. Kromer stripped life down to the details of what it took to survive as a “stiff,” lining up at soup kitchens, hopping freights, making the complicated calculations of what a hungry man might do for a meal.
Critics compared Kromer’s style to Hemingway. His themes were hunger, fear, endurance, and above all, the cruelty of a system that left millions with nothing. He wasn’t interested in prettying up the story.
Kromer’s second novel, Michael Kohler, would have turned to the struggles of working-class families and the violent West Virginia mine wars, but illness stopped him short.
Tuberculosis gnawed away at his health, and by the 1940s, he had retreated to New Mexico with his wife, Janet. After her death in Albuquerque in 1960, Tom returned to Huntington, where his sisters cared for him until his own death in 1969.
Our Song about Tom
For decades, Tom Kromer’s name nearly vanished, even in his hometown of Huntington. But now, through the good works of Marshall University English professor Stefan Schöberlein and his Appalachian literature students, Tom’s work has been rediscovered and brought to a new generation of students.
Reading a recent reprint of Waiting for Nothing, we in The Flood were struck by how Tom’s unsentimental eye fixed on the hungry and the forgotten of the Depression Era. Moved by the novel, the band decided to lend its hand in carrying on the Tom Kromer story by writing and recording this ballad to celebrate Huntington’s long-forgotten native son.
Following the lead of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Lead Belly, we set our lyrics to a traditional melody (in this case, a mashup of the thematically appropriate “Tramp on the Street” and the old hymn, “Farther Along”).
We hope the song encourages you to learn more about Kromer and his important work. A great way to start learning is to visit the new Thomas Kromer Digital Archive created by Schöberlein and his students, where you can read all of Waiting for Nothing online for free.
Click here to reach the archive. And if you’d like to own a printed copy of Tom’s novel, that reprint we read is available from Amazon.com.
However you choose read Tom Kromer, we think you’ll see for yourself that even in the darkest corners, someone can be compassionately paying attention.
