John Selby, "‘Waiting for Nothing,’ Written By Itinerant Author, Is Short Story Of Hopeless," The Lexington Herald 

March 3, 1935, p. 21

WAITING FOR NOTHING, by Tom Kromer; (Knopf).
Although Tom Kromer’s “Waiting for Nothing” can be read in two hours, it can not be forgotten at all. Some place in the back of this reviewer’s head there always will be a series of pictures from Mr. Kromer’s book.
He is writing the story of the hopeless and the hungry. The stiff is still a stiff because he lacks guts, he believes. Once he had a gun in his hand, and got as far as the paying teller’s window. But the gun stuck when he started to pull it out of his pocket, and he lost his nerve. And although a more accomplished soft showed him how to get real money out of women shoppers by planting a doughnut on the curb and then wolfing it, Kromer did not have the face to do it.
Ordinarily that reticence would seem commendable. It is a question whether it is when a man is desperate, hungry, and wet          
“Waiting for Nothing” contains a piece about a starving mother who deserted her baby. It contains another about a starving streetwalker who was saved by Mr. Kromer’s expert technique at getting stale food for pennies. It contains another about a man who died in a mission flop house, and still another about a boy who failed to hop a rattler and didn’t know he was dying—examples could be given by the dozen.
But what is important is that Mr. Kromer has last got onto paper the truth about the utterly hopeless. If the reader happens ever to have been both hungry and broke, he will understand.