Working Class Roots
Hoffer was influenced by his modest roots and working-class surroundings, seeing in it vast human potential. In a letter to Margaret Anderson in 1941, he wrote:
-
-
- My writing is done in railroad yards while waiting for a freight,
- in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch.
- Towns are too distracting.
-
He once remarked, "my writing grows out of my life just as a branch from a tree." When called an intellectual, he insisted that he was a longshoreman. Hoffer has been dubbed by some authors as a "longshoreman philosopher".
Read more about this topic: Eric Hoffer
Famous quotes containing the words working, class and/or roots:
“Peoples need a victory so bad. We’ve been working here since ‘62 and we haven’t got nothing, except a helluva lot of heartaches.”
—Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977)
“There might be a class of beings, human once, but now to humanity invisible, for whose scrutiny, and for whose refined appreciation of the beautiful, more especially than for our own, had been set in order by God the great landscape-garden of the whole earth.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The roots of the grass strain,
Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits—he is waiting—
And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)