A lady accused me of rape.”īukowski attracted the attention of John Martin, who founded Black Sparrow Press in 1965 specifically to publish him.Īs a fledgling writer, Bukowski made little money and continued to work at odd jobs-dishwasher, truck driver, guard, gas station attendant, shipping clerk, parking lot attendant, elevator operator, worker in dog biscuit, cake and cookie factories and, perhaps most permanently, as a mail sorter with the U.S. I threw bodies off my porch into the night. I wrote vile but interesting stuff that made people hate me, that made them curious about this Bukowski. He recognized when he began to write that a poet must be noticed in order to be read and later recounted: “I got my act up. How much of Bukowski’s harsh manner was mere showmanship-or salesmanship-is uncertain. When “It Catches My Heart in Its Hands: New and Selected Poems, 1955-63” was published in greater quantity in 1963, Bukowski found himself the sought-after darling of underground poetry magazines and local papers like the L.A. His first book of poetry-all 30 pages and 200 copies of it-was “Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail,” published in 1959. But instead of short stories, it came out as poetry.” “I was supposed to die and didn’t,” he said later. In 1955, he wound up in County-USC Medical Center with a bleeding ulcer. Then, in his own words, “I said the hell with it, I’ll just concentrate on drinking.”īukowski spent the next decade on a drunken binge, roaming the country and gathering experience. But he soon became disillusioned and dropped out, moving to New York and then Philadelphia to become a writer.Įxcused from the draft as “too antisocial,” he continued writing and collecting rejection slips from Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s magazine until 1946. In 1939, Bukowski enrolled at Los Angeles City College to study journalism and English. (Writer Paul Ciotti described him in a 1987 Los Angeles Times Magazine article as having “a sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids and a dominating nose that looks as if it was assembled in a junkyard from Studebaker hoods and Buick fenders.”)Ī small boy, young Bukowski was bullied by other boys and rejected by girls, attracting only what he described as “idiot friends.” At age 13, he discovered alcohol-the answer to beatings, boils, and rejection-in the family wine cellar of one of those friends. His stern father beat him with a razor strop for even minor infractions, causing such stress that the child developed widespread boils that scarred his complexion for life. Said to have mellowed in his later years-switching from hard liquor to good red wine and swallowing 40 vitamin pills a day-Bukowski had lived the rough life he so wittingly described.īorn in Andernach, Germany, in 1920, he moved to the United States with his family as a toddler, living first in Baltimore, then Pasadena and eventually Los Angeles. Chinaski was played by actor Mickey Rourke in “Barfly,” which concentrated on three days in Bukowski’s life at the age of 24. More than 2 million copies of his books are in print, most of them translated into languages ranging from French to Greek to Portuguese.īukowski’s hero frequently was his alter ego Henry Chinaski, a hard-drinking, womanizing, gambling writer who stumbles between bars and odd jobs. ![]() ![]() 13 August 2000 Bukowski profile (audio, 11 mins) NPR.A surprisingly disciplined and prolific writer in spite of his hard-drinking, womanizing, gambler persona, Bukowski published more than 1,000 poems, 32 books of poetry, five books of short stories, half a dozen novels and the screenplay.Interview with Bukowski 10 February 1987. "Mickey Rourke plays a tough barfly" Archived at the Wayback Machine."Bukowski Comes to Wormwood", The Wormwood Review 1985.Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Guide to the Charles Bukowski Manuscript.Boston University 26 March 2009 Archived 29 March 2010 at the Wayback Machine "Hanging with Bukowski at the Gotlieb Center". ![]()
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