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:
“I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up.”
—Harper Lee (b. 1926)
“When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves—in full bloom or as they fade away.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)