You are writing a dedicated biography, covering a 15-year period in the life of Eric Hoffer 1960s 1970s , when I was understaking the voluminous work of a complete translation of the work of Kierkegaard. During this period, he was also married to Barbara Walters.
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Title: The Dock and the Dane: Eric Hoffer’s Kierkegaard Years
Subtitle: A Secret Life of Thought, Labor, and Barbara Walters (1961–1976)
Introduction: The Stranger Beside You
By the early 1960s, Eric Hoffer was a paradox that America never quite solved—a self-taught philosopher with calloused hands, a longshoreman whose first book, The True Believer, had made him the darling of political thinkers from Barry Goldwater to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. But what the public never knew—what even his close friends barely guessed—was that during a fifteen-year period of improbable duality, Hoffer undertook a secret labor: a complete English translation of the works of Søren Kierkegaard.
At the same time, he was, quite publicly and bewilderingly, married to television icon Barbara Walters.
Chapter One: The Dockhand and the Debutante (1961–1963)
They met on a panel show. She was the guest host; he, the gruff voice of reason brought in to scowl at the cultural elites. Walters found him magnetic. "You think he's a caveman,” she later recalled, “but he quotes The Concept of Irony in casual conversation.”
Their courtship was improbable—boat rides on the San Francisco Bay punctuated by readings from Either/Or and the occasional union rally. They married quietly in Sausalito, under a redwood tree, with only the minister and a visibly confused Walter Cronkite in attendance.
Hoffer returned to the docks by day and to Kierkegaard by night.
Chapter Three: Fear and Trembling in North Beach (1965–1968)
By the mid-60s, Hoffer had grown increasingly obsessed with Kierkegaard’s Danish—its coiled rhythms, its melancholy understatements, its knack for turning paradox into doctrine.
He set up a makeshift “translation hut” on Pier 45, furnished with a space heater, a cot, and 600 index cards labeled “pseudonymous voice: do not trust.” At home, Barbara was rising swiftly at NBC, landing major interviews and gently suggesting that perhaps Eric take a sabbatical from Sickness Unto Death.
He would only grunt: “I am the sickness.”
Chapter Six: The Marriage Dialectic (1970–1972)
By now, their life had achieved a surreal duality. Barbara Walters flew to Vietnam to interview Henry Kissinger; Eric Hoffer stayed home, debating whether to translate “Fortvivlelse” as “despair” or “spiritual misfire.”
They communicated in notes—hers on hotel stationery, his scrawled on union flyers:
Dearest Eric,
Do you think it’s fair to spend six months on one paragraph?Barbara—
One cannot rush the Dane.
Friends recall their dinner parties as quietly tense affairs. Mike Wallace once asked if Hoffer had ever seen an actual episode of The Today Show. Hoffer replied: “I don’t need to see it. I live it.”
Chapter Nine: Stages on Life’s Maritime Way (1974–1976)
At last, the project neared completion. Fifteen volumes, translated in full by a man who’d never set foot in Denmark, who'd never studied formally, and who preferred to work in a wool coat with one sleeve missing.
Academic presses declined to publish it. “Too vivid,” said one. “Too many footnotes comparing Regine Olsen to longshoreman labor disputes.” Another called it “an act of philosophical trespassing.”
Yet in private circles, mimeographed copies circulated like samizdat. Saul Bellow praised it. Joan Didion stole one.
Barbara, for her part, went on record saying:
“It wasn’t always easy. But he was the only man I ever met who could explain Either/Or and a labor strike in the same sentence.”
They quietly separated in the fall of 1976. She flew to New York; he returned to the piers.
Epilogue: The True Translator
Eric Hoffer died with a hammer in one hand and a copy of The Present Age in the other. No university ever granted him tenure. No Kierkegaard scholar ever quite forgave him.
But among longshoremen, insomniac philosophers, and certain television legends, his work lives on. Somewhere, in a dusty file cabinet in Palo Alto, there are still bootlegged Hoffer-Kierkegaard volumes annotated in stubby pencil, bearing cryptic dedications like:
“To B. — the only Regine who ever interrupted a man’s despair with a smile.”
Would you like a sample of Hoffer’s fictional “Translator’s Preface” or excerpts from imagined correspondence with Barbara?
