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All the Lonely People (Ticknor & Fields: NY, 1983)
This book completed my trilogy of studies about “unfinished business” in contemporary America.
A Stranger in the
H
ouse
brought me back to the suburban world of my childhood, but for
All the Lonely People I went no further than around the corner from my flat on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. For a year and a half I paid daily visits to Single Room Occupancy Hotels in my neighborhood. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, Single Room Occupancy Hotels (or SROs) are derelict residential hotels packed with mental hospital outpatients, drug & alcohol addicts receiving permanent disability insurance (SSI), and a variety of "predators" trying to squeeze whatever money they can out of their vulnerable fellow residents. In other words, SROs are the dumping ground for people who our social system deems "useless." I befriended several SRO residents and tracked their lives over an eighteen month span. This book was part personal journal and part nonfiction novel made up of short “slice of life” episodes. It was painful to write. A couple of my subjects died during the period of my regular visits, and most of the other people I dealt with were stuck in self-destructive patterns well beyond my efforts at intervention.
When
All the Lonely People was published, I was interviewed on several television shows, and I co-produced a three-part treatment of my book that aired on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” My work on
All the Lonely People was driven by a sense of outrage that so many lives could be so easily discarded in a nation with such ample resources—so, naturally, I welcomed the attention that NPR brought to the situation.
As a writer, I was delighted that
All the Lonely People received a very favorable review in
The Nation from Clancy Sigal, a professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, whose novels,
Zone of the Interior and
Going Away, I’d admired for years. “Hamburger has a strong stomach for the piss, shit and vomit that, more than the mortar between the decaying bricks, seem to hold the Walden Hotel together,” Sigal wrote. “More important, he has patience, tolerance and a marvelous ability to ride over his disgust to a controlled literary anger.” Further on, he observed that “In several cases he ‘creates’ magnificent characters. (It is a fiction that the nonfiction writer does not shape his material to his own inner vision.) I believe these people, and I believe Hamburger has reported them fair and square.”
My work on
All the Lonely People won me a New York Foundation of the Arts award in Creative Nonfiction. The book was a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
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