Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski 1920-94, American underground poet and fiction writer, b. Andernach, Germany. His family immigrated to the United States in 1922, settling in Los Angeles. A hard-drinking unskilled worker and sometime denizen of skid row, Bukowski published his first short stories in the 1940s and earliest book of poetry in 1959. Ferociously bleak in their portrayal of life in general and Los Angeles in particular, his usually self-referential, often angry poetry and prose typically depicts alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, prostitutes, and other outcasts. During the 1960s he became an outsider hero, lauded by Sartre , Genet , and other literary celebrities. Many of Bukowski's "dirty realist" works feature as protagonist his alter ego, the womanizing tough-guy Henry Chinaski; they include the novels Post Office (1971) and Ham on Rye (1982). He wrote more than 40 volumes of poetry (some published posthumously), six novels, and several short-story collections as well as the screenplay for the semiautobiographical film Barfly (1987).

Bibliography: See his The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993 (2007); his selected letters (3 vol., 1993-99); D. Weitzmann, Drinking with Bukowski: Recollections of the Poet Laureate of Skid Row (2000); biographies by N. Cherkovski (rev. ed. 1997), H. Sounes (1999), M. G. Baughan (2004), and B. Miles (2006); studies by H. Fox (1968), J. Sherman (1982), R. Harrison (1994), G. Locklin (1995), J. J. Smith, ed. (1995), G. Brewer and F. Day, ed. (1997), J. Christy (1997), J. Thomas (1997), and B. Pleasants (2004); bibliography by A. Krumhansi (1999).

Bukowski, Charles (1920–94), born in Germany, son of a U.S. soldier and German woman, reared in the U.S., worked mainly as an unskilled laborer until, aged 35, he began to write poetry. His prolific output, published in many limited‐edition booklets, begun with Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960), includes larger collections: It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (1963), Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (1974), Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977), Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981), War All the Time (1985), You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Make Sense (1986), and The Last Night of the Earth, Poems (1992). In them his attitude is that of a tough, lowbrow outsider, egocentric and very masculine, whose personal interests and literary subjects are drink and sex and violence. He also wrote stories: Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972), Life and Death in the Charity Ward (1973), and South of No North (1973). Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969) is partly memoir and partly fiction, while other novels are Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), and Ham on Rye (1982), about the seedy life of the quasi‐autobiographical Henry Chinaski. Wholly autobiographical works include Confessions of a Man Insane Enough To Live with Beasts (1965) and Shakespeare Never Did This (1979). Hollywood, a Novel (1989) is an account of the author's dealings with the film colony. Septuagenarian Stew (1990) prints a mixture of poems and stories.