This autobiographical novel, which has been out of print for many years, was originally published in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression. It tells the story of a young man, typical of thousands in the thirties, who is out of work and down on his luck in New York City. His life is a struggle for simple survival - how to find food, how to find shelter for the night. The preoccupation with staying alive in a seemingly indifferent world - days spent looking for handouts, nights spent in flophouses, missions, and jails - leads inevitably to humiliation, despair and spiritual defeat. Waiting for Nothing is a compelling human document - like Henry Roth's Call It Sleep and Jack Conroy's The Disinherited - which comes out of harsh, direct, personal experience, the experience of a decade in which the nation was nearly overcome by a sense of hopelessness and fear.