Thomas Michael Kromer (October 20, 1906 – January 10, 1969) was an American writer, mostly known for his Waiting for Nothing (1935), a semi-autobiographical novel of vagrant or hobo life during the Great Depression. Biography Kromer was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, the oldest of five brothers, and he had at least two sisters. His mother was Grace Thornburg, and his father was Michael Albert Kromer, an immigrant from Russia who worked as a coal miner and glass blower. He attended Marshall University for periods in 1925-1929 and did not graduate. He wrote his novel after five years of living as a hobo, riding trains and traveling across the United States. He spent 15 months in CCC camp in California, but was mostly living as a vagabond. Kromer spent time at Camp Skull Creek, Camp Murpheys, Fort MacArther, and Camp Halls Flat. He also published short stories in Pacific Weekly, founded and edited by Lincoln Steffens, and an unfinished novel about coal mining and glass blowing, Michael Kohler, a section of which he adapted as a short story for the American Spectator. Kromer's literary agent was Maxim Lieber, recommended to him by Lincoln Steffens who was the first literary figure to read and praise the manuscript for Waiting for Nothing. He married Jeannette (Janet) Smith in 1936 while he was being treated for tuberculosis and she for rheumatic heart disease in Albuquerque. They restored an adobe house in Albuquerque, and it is on the National Register of Historic Places. He stopped writing in the 1940s, became a recluse, and lived as an invalid in Albuquerque. After his wife died in 1958, his family returned him to Huntington, West Virginia, where his sisters and mother cared for him. He died there in 1969 and was buried at Spring Hill Cemetery in Huntington in a family plot. Waiting for Nothing Dedicated "to Jolene, who turned off the gas," the work is a realistic account of life as a homeless man during the Great Depression. There is no overarching theme to the novel, which is a collection of anecdotes. Except for a few stories, Kromer said the incidents in the novel were autobiographical. Straightforward, declarative sentences in the tough-guy argot of the time ("I admire that stiff. He has got the guts. He does not like parting with his dough") are characteristic of Kromer, as are spare descriptions of grim scenes