Eric Hoffer gleaning the world’s ideas during a work break (San Francisco docks, 1950s)
Brock Meier’s novel The Stone Cutter gains Eric Hoffer recognition
The Eric Hoffer Award, and the Award Committee, have made public their selections for the best independent international books of 2023/2024. Brock Meier’s debut novel, The Stone Cutter, attained three different aspects of recognition by the committee:
- First Horizon Finalist (best debut book),
- Grand Prize Short-list, and
- Best Historical Fiction, First Runner-up
The Eric Hoffer Award honors the original thought and spirit of the unconventional, great American philosopher Eric Hoffer. The award celebrates new and significant literary works overlooked by the publishing world. Since the award’s beginning, the Hoffer Award has risen to among the largest and most prestigious international book awards for small, academic, and independent presses.
What do these notable authors have in common?
Jane Austen, Brandon Sanderson, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, and Mark Twain—what’s the deal? Each one—and dozens of other equally prominent authors—found it necessary to circumvent the literary gatekeepers of their time (agents, editors, publishing houses, etc.) in order to get their works of exceptional merit before readers. The list is long of freethinking writers who have dared to self-publish their work.
Near the start of this 21st century, the Eric Hoffer Book Award was founded to help break the strangle-hold of the Manhattan “literary monolith” by recognizing noteworthy international books overlooked or even outright rejected by Manhattan.
Okay, who was this Eric Hoffer guy?
Hoffer was an entirely self-educated man, and one of the most significant social and moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Having lost both parents at an early age, and blind from the age of seven to fifteen, he floated on the margins of society, from Los Angeles’ Skid Row, to California migrant farm work, and by 1941 finally settling as a longshoreman working on the docks of San Francisco Bay. In 1964 at the age of 66, Hoffer retired from the docks to become an adjunct political science professor at the University of California at Berkley, finally withdrawing from the public eye in 1970.
During his five decades as a common laborer, he occupied most of his free time reading and in libraries (he held library cards from dozens of towns up and down the length of California). In the process, he absorbed much of the world’s most illuminating ideas, thus sparking his own, and leading to a dozen deeply considered and well reasoned volumes of writings. His collected, unpublished papers and notebooks occupy 75 feet of shelf space.
Unique as a philosopher/author, Hoffer not only lived a laborer’s life before writing, but continued in that lifestyle during his more than two decades of writing and publishing.
In a 1941 letter, 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.”
Like philosophers and prophets of old, he saw himself as one who was free to tell the truth without fear of patron, publisher, department head, or tenure committee. Hoffer’s first book in 1951, The True Believer—a treatise on mass movements—remains in active print over seventy years later. Among his many ardent admirers were mathematician/philosopher Bertrand Russel, President Dwight Eisenhower, and historian Arthur Schleshinger. Late in life, during the early decades of the television medium, Hoffer was the guest of important interviewers of the day.
Two years before his death in 1985, this American original was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan. That day, he stood with twelve other notable Americans, including such luminaries as George Balanchine, Buckminster Fuller, and Billy Graham. Among his remarks about Hoffer, Reagan said: “Mr. Hoffer’s spirit, self-reliance and great accomplishments remind us all that the United States remains a land where each of us is free to achieve the best that lies within us.”
Founding of the Eric Hoffer Award
About twenty years ago, author and former NASA rocket scientist Christopher Klim founded the Eric Hoffer Book Award to recognize the substantial contributions of freethinking writers and independent books of exceptional merit. The Eric Hoffer Estate welcomed the use of Hoffer’s name and legacy, which is appropriately honored with the Eric Hoffer Project and the associated Eric Hoffer Award. With the meteoric rise of self- and independent publishing in the twenty-first century, the Eric Hoffer Book Award stands as one of the oldest and most prestigious champions of freethinking and independent literature. Nominations for the international award come from small academic presses, micro-presses, and indie/self-publishing.
A “sacred duty”
In one of his hundreds of notebooks, Eric Hoffer wrote:
“God has implanted in us the seeds of all greatness and it behooves us to see to it that the seeds germinate, grow, and come to flower. We must see learning and growing as a sort of worship. For God has implanted capacities and talents in us, and it is our sacred duty to finish God’s work.”
