Word: hoffer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After four widely acclaimed books, a vivid CBS-TV interview and a celebrated meeting with President Johnson, Longshoreman-Philosopher Eric Hoffer, 65, has become a hot literary property. So the Manhattan-based Ledger Syndicate asked him to do a newspaper column. His first response to Ledger President John W. Higgins was a resounding no, but he finally relented. An impressive 214 newspapers have now signed up for his weekly column called "Reflections...
Four "Reflections" have appeared to date. Like his books, they deal with what book reviewers call "the human condition" and therefore are not required to be topical. While most columnists are content to get a few facts straight, Hoffer likes to sum up whole civilizations with epigrammatic flourish. In this week's column, he chides U.S. intellectuals. They are "likely to consider any achievement not fathered by words as illegitimate," he writes. "Hence their disdain of things which have come to pass by chance. To the intellectual, America's unforgivable sin is that it has revolutions without revolutionaries...
Though it is strictly a local television channel, station KQED had the imagination and daring to begin a 13-interview series with Longshoreman-Philosopher Eric Hoffer five years before CBS discovered him. This fall KQED became the first U.S. station since 1960 to shoot a documentary inside Castro's Cuba. Its special on Duke Ellington, Love You Madly, was so lively that it was later played at the Edinburgh and Venice film festivals. Then there was the channel's Where's Jim Crow?, a weekly segment rooting out covert discrimination in the area. And, for a change...
Every once in a while, television interviewers have journalistic sense enough to put a good subject in front of a camera and just get out of the way. It worked so successfully last September with Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State of Mind that CBS rescheduled the 60-minute show for this week (Tuesday, 10 p.m.). Though Eric Sevareid is the reporter of record, the program is Hoffer, the shirtsleeved philosopher from the San Francisco waterfront, whose aphorisms and world views have sold 700,000 books (The True Believer, The Temper of Our Time) and have produced disciples from the University...
...Hoffer, 65, comes on with a muscular humanism that hymns ordinary people and the land that enthroned them. "The only new thing in history," he says, "is America. It's blasphemous to say that, you know, but it's true." And what is America's contribution? "The deproletarianization of the working man. He ceases to be a proletarian. He thinks he's as good as everybody else." Hoffer knows he is. "You can almost close your eyes," he says, "reach over the sidewalk and make a man President, and he'll turn...