It was then he left skid row and became a migrant worker. The experience gave him a new determination to live adventurously. In 1931, he attempted suicide by drinking a solution of oxalic acid, but the attempt failed as he could not bring himself to swallow the poison. Uncomfortable with this discovery, he quit after one day. On one such job, selling oranges door-to-door, he discovered he was a natural salesman and could easily make good money. He spent the next 10 years on Los Angeles' skid row, reading, occasionally writing, and working odd jobs.
Sensing that warm Los Angeles was the best place for a poor man, Hoffer took a bus there in 1920. The cabinetmaker's union paid for the funeral and gave Hoffer a little over three hundred dollars. Hoffer was a young man when his father, a cabinetmaker, died.
His eyesight remained, and Hoffer never abandoned his habit of voracious reading. Fearing he would again go blind, he seized upon the opportunity to read as much as he could for as long as he could. His eyesight inexplicably returned when he was 15. After his mother's death he was raised by a live-in relative or servant, a German woman named Martha. She did not recover and died in that second year after the fall.I lost my sight and for a time my memory"). Two years before, my mother and I fell down a flight of stairs. Hoffer went blind for unknown medical reasons two years later, but later in life he said he thought it might have been due to trauma. When he was age five, his mother fell down a flight of stairs with Eric in her arms. By the age of five, he could read in both German and English. Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City in 1902 (or possibly 1898), the son of Knut and Elsa Hoffer, immigrants from Alsace. In 2001, the Eric Hoffer Award was established in his honor with permission granted by the Eric Hoffer Estate in 2005.
His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that his book The Ordeal of Change was his finest work. He produced ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983 by President of the United States Ronald Reagan. Eric Hoffer was an American social writer and philosopher.
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