The American Spectator : The Mystery of Eric Hoffer

The American Spectator : The Mystery of Eric Hoffer
Excerpt:
...But we know very little about his life before the mid-1930s. That is where the mystery comes in. We know that he moved to San Francisco soon after Pearl Harbor and rented a room in a low-rent district. There he wrote The True Believer, using a plank for a desk. Before that he was a migrant worker in California's Central Valley—stoop labor picking fruit and vegetables.
In 1934 he showed up at a federal homeless shelter in El Centro, California, close to the Mexican border. A trucker drove him there from San Diego, where he was so hungry that he ate cabbage "cow style" at a wholesale food depot. Where was he before San Diego?...