21 Facts About Eric Hoffer

Eric Hoffer was an American philosopher and social critic.

The Eric Hoffer Book Award is an international literary prize established in his honor.

Eric Hoffer's parents were immigrants from Alsace, then part of Imperial Germany.

Eric Hoffer did not recover and died in that second year after the fall.

Eric Hoffer was raised by a live-in relative or servant, a German immigrant named Martha.

Eric Hoffer's recovery proved permanent, but Hoffer never abandoned his reading habit.

Eric Hoffer left Skid Row and became a migrant worker, following the harvests in California.

Eric Hoffer wrote a novel, Four Years in Young Hank's Life, and a novella, Chance and Mr Kunze, both partly autobiographical.

Eric Hoffer tried to enlist in the US Army at age 40 during World War II, but he was rejected due to a hernia.

Eric Hoffer left the docks in 1964, and shortly after became an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Eric Hoffer called himself an atheist but had sympathetic views of religion and described it as a positive force.

Eric Hoffer died at his home in San Francisco in 1983 at the age of 80.

Eric Hoffer was influenced by his modest roots and working-class surroundings, seeing in it vast human potential.

Eric Hoffer fathered a child with Lili Fabilli Osborne, named Eric Osborne, who was born in 1955 and raised by Lili Osborne and her husband, Selden Osborne.

Eric Hoffer claimed to have been born and raised in the Bronx but had no Bronx accent.

Eric Hoffer's lover and executor Lili Fabilli stated that she always thought Hoffer was an immigrant.

Eric Hoffer came to public attention with the 1951 publication of his first book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, which consists of a preface and 125 sections, which are divided into 18 chapters.

Eric Hoffer consequently argues that the appeal of mass movements is interchangeable: in the Germany of the 1920s and the 1930s, for example, the Communists and National Socialists were ostensibly enemies, but sometimes enlisted each other's members, since they competed for the same kind of marginalized, angry, frustrated people.

Subsequent to the publication of The True Believer, Eric Hoffer touched upon Asia and American interventionism in several of his essays.

In "The Awakening of Asia", published in The Reporter and later his book The Ordeal of Change, Eric Hoffer discusses the reasons for unrest on the continent.

Eric Hoffer's papers, including 131 of the notebooks he carried in his pockets, were acquired in 2000 by the Hoover Institution Archives.