Volume 12, Number 9 · May 8, 1969
Only in America
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
The Temper of Our Time
by Eric Hoffer
Harper & Row, 111 pp., $3.95
Working and Thinking on the Waterfront
by Eric Hoffer
Harper & Row, 180 pp., $4.95
Eric Hoffer
by Calvin Tompkins, with Aphorisms by Eric Hoffer
Dutton, 114 pp., $4.95
In September, 1967—fifteen years after his first and best-known book The True Believer had been published—Eric Hoffer, the San Francisco longshoreman and author, made his debut on national television. The broadcast, an hour-long interview, 'made millions of confused and troubled Americans feel very much better about their country. He had pulled aside the veils of supposed sophistication and, in new ways, showed them again the old truths about America and why they remain alive and valid,' the interviewer, Eric Sevareid, observes in his Introduction to Mr. Tomkins's book. It was rerun two months later and led to an agreement whereby Mr. Hoffer and Mr. Sevareid are to broadcast a similar dialogue each year. Meanwhile, Tomkins reports, Hoffer remains in touch with his public through 'a syndicated column of Hoffer 'Reflections' (culled mostly from his published writings and now appearing in more than seventy newspapers).'
Review, 3674 words
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