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Charles Bukowski

 
Who2 Biography: Charles Bukowski, Writer / Poet
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  • Born: 16 August 1920
  • Birthplace: Andernach, Germany
  • Died: 9 March 1994 (leukemia)
  • Best Known As: The guy who wrote the movie Barfly

Henry Charles Bukowski was a drunken loafer and prolific writer known best for writing the autobiographical screenplay for Barfly (1987). "Hank" Bukowski was born in Germany but spent almost all of his life around Los Angeles, a city that figures prominently in his work. He first began publishing short stories (as Charles Bukowski) in the 1940s, but until the 1960s led an itinerant life on the fringes of society, working occasionally and abusing alcohol regularly. In the '60s and '70s his poems, short stories and essays appeared in small publications in the U.S. and Europe and he earned a small but loyal audience. He worked off and on in a post office until 1970, when he accepted a $100 monthly stipend from his publisher to "write and starve." The subject matter of his own life and his bare, sometimes comic descriptions of disaffected outsiders made him an underground celebrity, well-known in Europe and largely ignored in the U.S. -- until the movie Barfly. He died in 1994 after battling leukemia, leaving many works to be published posthumously. His poetry collections include It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (1963) and Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977 (1977); his short story collections include Hot Water Music (1983) and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1986); his novels include Post Office (1971) and Factotum (1975, the basis of the 2006 movie with Matt Dillon).

The character Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's "alter ego," appears in much of his poetry and fiction... Bukowski's epitaph is "Don't Try."

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Charles Bukowski
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(born Aug. 16, 1920, Andernach, Ger. — died March 9, 1994, San Pedro, Calif., U.S.) German-born U.S. poet, short-story writer, and novelist. His family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1922. He began publishing short stories in the mid 1940s. His first poetry collection, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, appeared in 1959, and the poetry volumes he published regularly for the next few years earned a devoted cult following. His novels include Post Office (1971) and Factotum (1975); he also wrote the screenplay for the film Barfly (1987), a semiautobiographical comedy about alcoholic lovers. The novel Hollywood (1989) dealt with its filming. His writing, often scurrilous but humorous, frequently reflected his perpetually down-and-out mode of existence.

For more information on Charles Bukowski, visit Britannica.com.

Biography: Charles Bukowski
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A prolific and seminal figure in underground literature, Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) is best known for poetry and fiction in which he caustically indicts bourgeois society while celebrating the desperate lives of alcoholics, prostitutes, decadent writers, and other disreputable characters in and around Los Angeles.

Born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, Bukowski emigrated to Los Angeles in 1922 with his father, an American soldier, and his German mother. As an adolescent he was distanced from his peers by a disfiguring case of acne and he resisted the attempts of his abusive and uncompromising father to instill in him the American ideals of hard work and patriotism. Following high school, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941 but left without obtaining a degree. He began writing hundreds of unsuccessful short stories while drifting from city to city in a succession of low-paying jobs - including work as a mailman, post office clerk, Red Cross orderly, and laborer in a slaughterhouse and a dog biscuit factory. Although he published his first short story, "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip," in a 1944 issue of Story magazine at the age of twenty-four, Bukowski virtually stopped writing for a decade, choosing instead to live as an alcoholic on skid row. After being hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer in 1955, Bukowski began writing poetry and resolved to drink less heavily. During this period he discovered the literature of Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and especially Ernest Hemingway, which offered him an alternative to alcoholism and aided in the development of his own concise, realistic prose style.

Bukowski published his first collection of poetry, Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail, in 1960. He quickly produced a series of poetry chapbooks, including Longshot Poems for Broke Players and Run with the Hunted, featuring surreal verse that expresses sentimentality for the West's Romantic past as well as disgust for the vacuousness of modern culture. While these poems garnered him a small but loyal following over the next decade, Bukowski's work in the short story genre first gained him a wide readership and established his literary reputation. Beginning in 1967, when the antiwar and counterculture movements flourished in the United States, Bukowski began contributing a weekly column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," to the Los Angeles alternative newspaper Open City, and later, to the Los Angeles Free Press. Combining journalism, fiction, and philosophy in a rambling, disjointed style, these pieces established his philosophy and defiant, anarchic persona. Perceiving American culture as hypocritical, Bukowski censured American films and television as escapist wish-fulfillment, morality as organized hypocrisy, patriotism as conformism, and academic writers, scholars, and intellectuals as self-righteous charlatans who attack American society while reaping its benefits.

Bukowski began his career writing poetry critical of American bourgeois institutions while disclaiming the title of writer: "To say I'm a poet puts me in the company of versifiers, neontasters, fools, clods, and skoundrels [sic] masquerading as wise men." In Longshot Poems for Broke Players, Bukowski introduces his characteristic outsider protagonist: the unstudied, self-exiled poet who provokes public enmity through his apparent rudeness to writers and other socialites, and maintains his freedom and uniqueness as a writer by rejecting the public literary world. In "Letter from the North," for example, the narrator responds to a despondent writer's request for sympathy with the question: "write you? about what my friend? / I'm only interested in poetry." In ensuing collections such as It Catches My Heart in Its Hands and Crucifix in a Deathhand, Bukowski's narrator retains his hostility to the outer world while revealing a paradoxical inner gentleness. In "Fuzz," the unsteady protagonist unexpectedly empathizes with a group of children who are taunting him: "when I go into the liquor store / they whirl around outside / like bees / shut out from their nest. / I buy a fifth of cheap / whiskey / and/3/ candy bars." Much of Bukowski's subsequent poetry, collected in such volumes as Poems Written before Jumping out of an 8-story Window, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills, and Fire Station, deals in concrete, realistic terms with acts of rape, sodomy, deceit, and violence, particularly focusing on sexual relationships characterized by physical and emotional abuse in which women seek to enslave men through marriage and men attempt to avoid such enslavement through the equally imprisoning pursuit of wealth and material pleasures.

Many of the events described in Bukowski's poetry recur in the autobiographical short stories and novels he began writing in the 1970s. While his earlier stories, many of which were published in men's pornographic magazines, generally employ stock formulas, Bukowski's later fiction, published in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness and South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life, is more sophisticated, philosophical, and pointedly critical of American society. Many of these stories focus on sexual relationships that feminist and other critics have faulted as misogynistic. Other critics, however, believe these works expose the short-sightedness, pettiness, and spiritual bankruptcy of a dysfunctional society.

During the 1970s Bukowski began writing semiautobiographical novels featuring the first-person narrator Henry ("Hank") Chinaski, a hard-boiled, alcoholic survivor who trades a mediocre, normal life for a position that allows for unromanticized self-awareness in the socially unrestricted environment of the ghetto. Bukowski's first novel, Post Office, contrasts the mindlessness and monotony of Chinaski's work life as an employee of the United States Post Office with the varying degradation and vitality of his unconventional personal life. Factotum chronicles Chinaski's experiences as a young man before the events related in Post Office, while Ham on Rye recounts his adolescent years and conflicts with his tyrannical father. Women details Chinaski's sexual exploits after the events chronicled in Post Office and his eventual desire for a monogamous relationship. Chinaski is also a central character in Bukowski's novel Barfly, which he adapted into a screenplay for the film directed by Barbet Schroeder and starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. Bukowski's encounters with California's film industry are also detailed in Hollywood, another novel featuring Chinaski. Bukowski died of leukemia in Los Angeles in 1994

Further Reading

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 9, 1978, Volume 41, 1987.

Contemporary Novelists, 4th edition, edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1986.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale, 1980.

A Bibliography of Charles Bukowski, Dorbin, Sanford, Black Sparrow Press, 1969.

Charles Bukowski: A Critical and Bibliographical Study, Fox, Hugh, Abyss Publications, 1969.

Bukowski: Friendship, Fame, and Bestial Myth, Sherman, Jory, Blue Horse Press, 1982.

A Charles Bukowski Checklist, Weinberg, Jeffrey, editor, Water Row Press, 1987.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Charles Bukowski
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Bukowski, Charles, 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).

Works: Works by Charles Bukowski
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(1920-1994)

1960Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail. The first of Bukowski's more than sixty books establishes in aggressively unsettling verses his characteristic themes of desolation among society's misfits and outcasts and the absurdity of life. Nearly annual volumes would follow, published during the decade by small presses to a small, appreciative coterie. Born in Germany and raised in Los Angeles, Bukowski endured a nearly decade-long alcoholic binge before beginning his professional writing career at age thirty-five.

Quotes By: Charles Bukowski
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Quotes:

"The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the Watchtower itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you're out, you're dead. This pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It's no wonder they keep getting busted."

"That is what friendship means. Sharing the prejudice of experience."

"Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities."

"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."

Artist: Charles Bukowski
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Similar Artists:

Amiri Baraka, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac

Followers:

Tom Russell
  • Born: 1920, Andernach, Germany
  • Died: March 09, 1994, San Pedro, CA
  • Active: '60s, '70s, '80s
  • Genres: Spoken Word
  • Instrument: Vocals, Main Performer, Performer
  • Representative Albums: "Poems and Insults," "Hostage," "Reads His Poetry"

Biography

As a poet, writer, screenwriter, and spoken-word performer, Charles Bukowski plumbed such depraved aspects of human nature as wanton drunkenness, sexuality, and brawling. In the meantime, he cultivated a reputation for -- you guessed it -- such depraved behavior as wanton drunkenness, lewdness, and brawling. The result was international fame, recognition, and accolades.

Born in Andernach, Germany, in 1920, Bukowski came to the United States at the age of three and was raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for 50 years. Publishing his first story at 24 and spending many years in run-down rooming houses, working at odd jobs and for the United States Postal Service, he published nearly 50 books of prose and poetry in his lifetime (works that dealt primarily with his Skid Row existence). His mythic persona even made it onto the big screen, portrayed by Mickey Rourke in the Bukowski-penned Barfly. He died in San Pedro, CA, on March 9, 1994, of pneumonia, shortly after completing his last novel. Bukowski was 73 years old.

While Bukowski supposedly hated public performances of his work, some recordings of his readings have been released. The most widely available is Hostage (1994) on the Rhino imprint Word Beat. King of Poets, a collection of home recordings came out in 1997, while both 70 Minutes in Hell (another home recording) and the remastered Poems & Insults, a notorious 1975 public reading from San Francisco, saw the light of day in 2000. ~ Erik Hage, All Music Guide
Actor: Charles Bukowski
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  • Born: Aug 16, 1920
  • Died: Mar 09, 1994
  • Occupation: Actor, Writer
  • Active: '80s
  • Major Genres: Language & Literature, Drama
  • Career Highlights: Barfly, Factotum, Bukowski: Born Into This
  • First Major Screen Credit: Charles Bukowski: There's Gonna Be a God Damn Riot in Here! Live in Vancouver (1979)

Biography

Charles Bukowski made a career of writing gritty short stories, poems, novels, and the occasional screenplay. His favorite subjects concerned life among the drunken, the destitute, the degraded, and the debauched. That he spent most of his life living that way himself only added an intriguing realism, albeit an often unpleasant one, to his work. Bukowski was born in Germany, the son of a German woman and a U.S. soldier stationed in Anderbach during the American occupation. When Bukowski was still a tot, the family moved to Los Angeles, CA, where he had a tough childhood. An alcoholic for the bulk of his life, Bukowski spent his young adult years wandering from job to job and living in assorted flop houses, until he landed a job working for the U.S. Post Office. He remained there for a decade and then began focusing on his writing. He started to write in the early '40s, and though he would later deny it, would publish steadily in obscure literary journals for the next four decades. After his poems were published in the Los Angeles Free Press in the mid-'50s, Bukowski began to gather a cult following. From there, he hit his most prolific period, producing more than 40 novels, countless poems, and short stories. He also dabbled occasionally in screenplays, the most famous of which is Barfly (1987), a hard-hitting autobiographical account of a pair of emotionally involved alcoholics starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. In 1989, Bukowski published Hollywood, a book about his screenwriting experience. Some of his other books have also been made into feature films, including Tales of Ordinary Madness, which is based on a similarly-titled 1973 book. From 1976 until the time of his death, Bukowski was married to Linda Lee Beighle. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Wikipedia: Charles Bukowski
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Henry Charles Bukowski

Born August 16, 1920(1920-08-16)
Andernach, Germany
Died March 9, 1994 (aged 73)
Los Angeles, California, USA
Occupation Novelist, Poet, Short story writer, Columnist
Nationality American
Literary movement Dirty realism,[1][2] Transgressive fiction[3]

Henry Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German- American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles, and is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. A prolific author, Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a "laureate of American lowlife."[4]

Contents

Early years

Bukowski was born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Germany to Heinrich Bukowski and Katharina Fett. His mother was a native German who met his father, an American serviceman, after World War I had ended. Bukowski's parents were Roman Catholic.[5] He was fond of claiming that he had been born out of wedlock, but Andernach records show that his parents were in fact married a month prior to his birth.[6]

After the collapse of the German economy following the First World War, the family moved to the United States in 1923, originally settling in Baltimore, Maryland. To sound more American, Bukowski's parents began calling him "Henry" and altered the pronunciation of the family name from Buk-ov-ski to Buk-cow-ski (the surname is of Slavic origin). After saving money, the family moved to South Los Angeles in 1930, where his father's family lived.[6] During Bukowski's childhood, his father was often unemployed, and Bukowski claimed that his father was violent, later described in his novel Ham on Rye.

Bukowski was bullied by Anglo neighbor children who mocked his thick German accent and the German-style clothing that his parents insisted he wear. During his youth Bukowski was socially inept and withdrawn - a condition later exacerbated by an extreme case of acne.[7]

In his early teens Bukowski had an epiphany when he was introduced to alcohol by his friend William "Baldy" Mullinax, son of an alcoholic surgeon. "This [alcohol] is going to help me for a very long time," he later wrote, describing the genesis of his chronic alcoholism; or, as he saw it, the genesis of a method he could utilize to come to more amicable terms with his own life.[8]

After graduating from Los Angeles High School, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College for two years, taking courses in art, journalism, and literature. While studying there, he briefly associated with a group of Nazis, the German-American Bund, whom he disparaged in Ham on Rye.[5] He wrote about them in the short story "Politics" from the collection South of No North: "At L.A City College just before World War Two, I posed as a Nazi. I hardly knew Hitler from Hercules and cared less. It was just that sitting in class and hearing all the patriots preach how we should go over and do the beast in, I grew bored. I decided to become the opposition. I didn't even bother to read up on Adolf, I simply spouted anything that I felt was evil or maniacal."[9]

On July 22, 1944, with World War II still raging, Bukowski was arrested by FBI agents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was living at the time, on suspicion of draft evasion and was held for 17 days in Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison. Sixteen days later he failed a physical psychological exam and was given a Selective Service Class of 4-F (unfit for military service).[10]

Early writing

At 24, Bukowski's short story "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip" was published in Story magazine. Two years later, another short story, "20 Tanks From Kasseldown," was published in Portfolio III's broadside collection. Failing to break into the literary world, Bukowski grew disillusioned with the publication process and quit writing for almost a decade, a time that he has referred to as a "ten-year-drunk." These "lost years" formed the basis for his later autobiographical chronicles, although the veracity of his accounts has been frequently called into question. During part of this period he continued living in Los Angeles, working at a pickle factory for a short time, but also spent some time roaming about the United States, working sporadically and staying in cheap rooming houses.[5] In the early 1950s Bukowski took a job as a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service in Los Angeles, but resigned just before three years service.

In 1955, he was hospitalized for a bleeding ulcer which was nearly fatal. When he left the hospital, he began to write poetry.[5] In 1957, he agreed to marry small-town Texas poet Barbara Frye, sight unseen, but they divorced in 1959. Frye insisted that their separation had nothing to do with literature, though she often doubted his skill as a poet. According to Howard Sounes's "Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life" she later died under mysterious circumstances in India (some said[who?] she was decapitated by religious zealots belonging to an obscure cult). Following his divorce, Bukowski continued drinking and writing poetry.[5]

1960s

By 1960 he had returned to the post office in Los Angeles, where he continued to work as a letter filing clerk for over a decade. In 1962 Bukowski was traumatized by the death of Jane Cooney Baker. She had been his first real romantic attachment. Bukowski turned his grief and devastation into a powerful series of poems and stories lamenting her passing. Jane is considered to be the greatest love of his life and was the most important in a long series of 'Muses' who inspired his writing, according to biographers Jory Sherman, Souness, Brewer, and Harrison[citation needed]. In 1964, a daughter, Marina Louise Bukowski, was born to Bukowski and his then live-in girlfriend Frances Smith, whom he fondly referred to as a "white-haired hippy", "shack-job" and "old snaggle-tooth".

Jon and Louise Webb, now recognized as giants of the post-war 'small-press movement', published The Outsider literary magazine and featured some of Bukowski's poetry. Under the Loujon Press imprint, they published Bukowski's It Catches My Heart In Its Hands (1963), and Crucifix in a Deathhand, in 1965.

Beginning in 1967, Bukowski wrote the column "Notes of A Dirty Old Man" for Los Angeles' Open City, an underground newspaper. When Open City was shut down in 1969, the column was picked up by the Los Angeles Free Press along with NOLA Express in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1969, Bukowski and his friend Neeli Cherkovski launched their own mimeographed literary magazine, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. They produced three issues over the next two years. The magazine had no effect whatsoever on their careers or literature, and is only remembered because of Bukowski's association with it.

Black Sparrow years

In 1969, he accepted an offer from Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin and quit his post office job to dedicate himself to full-time writing. He was then 49 years old. As he explained in a letter at the time, "I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy ... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve."[11] Less than one month after leaving the postal service, he finished his first novel, Post Office. As a measure of respect for Martin's financial support and faith in a then relatively unknown writer, Bukowski published almost all of his subsequent work with Black Sparrow, although in 1973 he also contributed to Bruce Conforth's literary magazine Slowglass, along with John Lennon and Allen Ginsberg.

With increasing notoriety and growing fame, Bukowski embarked on a series of love affairs and one-night stands. His most important relationships were with Linda King, a poet and sculptress, Liza Williams, a recording executive, and Pamela O'Brien AKA "Cupcakes"(dubbed by her friends because of her size 38D chest), a red-headed single mother. All of these relationships provided material for his stories and poems. Another important relationship was with "Tanya", pseudonym of "Amber O'Neil" (also a pseudonym), described in Bukowski's "Women" as a pen-pal that evolved into a week-end tryst at Bukowski's modest DeLongpre residence in L.A. in the 1970s. "Amber O'Neil" later wrote a book about the affair entitled "Blowing My Hero". The book was not published due to inclusion of several love letters written by Bukowski.

Charles Bukowski in 1990

In 1976, Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle, a health food restaurant owner, aspiring actress and devotee of Meher Baba, leader of an Indian religious society. Two years later, Bukowski moved from the East Hollywood area, where he had lived for most of his life, to the harborside community of San Pedro,[12] the southernmost district of the City of Los Angeles. Beighle followed him and they lived together intermittently over the next two years, Bukowski sometimes tiring (he said) of the relationship and sending her on her way.

After a series of 'hunger strikes' and pleadings on the part of Beighle, Bukowski relented and took Beighle back in. They were eventually married by Manly Palmer Hall, a Canadian-born author and mystic, in 1985. Beighle is referred to as "Sara" in Bukowski's novels Women and Hollywood.

Death

Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994, in San Pedro, California, at the age of 73, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. The funeral rites, orchestrated by his widow, were conducted by Buddhist monks. An account of the proceedings can be found in Gerald Locklin's book Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet.[citation needed]

His gravestone reads: "Don't Try", a phrase which Bukowski uses in one of his poems, advising aspiring writers and poets about inspiration and creativity. Bukowski explains the phrase in a 1963 letter to John William Corrington as follows: 'Somebody at one of these places ... asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.'[13]

In 2007 and 2008, there was a movement to save Bukowski's bungalow from destruction. The movement was led online by Beatdom magazine, and was ultimately successful, with the bungalow listed as a historic property.[14]

Work

Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s, with the poems and stories being later republished by Black Sparrow Press (now HarperCollins/ECCO) as collected volumes of his work. In the 1980s, he collaborated with illustrator Robert Crumb on a series of comic books, with Bukowski writing and Crumb providing the artwork.

Bukowski also performed live readings of his works, beginning in 1962 on radio station KPFK in Los Angeles and increasing frequency through the 1970s. He agreed to live readings as a source of income, but they took a toll on his writing and health. Heavy drinking was a featured part of the readings, along with a combative banter with the audience. By the late 1970s Bukowski's income was sufficient to give up live readings. His last international reading was given in in October 1979 in Vancouver, BC, which was video taped and released on DVD as It's Gonna be a God Damn Riot in Here. In March 1980 he gave his very last reading at the Sweetwater club in Redondo Beach, which was video taped and recorded - released as Hostage on audio CD and The Last Straw on DVD.

Bukowski acknowledged Anton Chekhov, James Thurber, Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, John Fante, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robinson Jeffers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, Antonin Artaud, E.E. Cummings, and others as influences, and often spoke of Los Angeles as his favorite subject. In a 1974 interview he said, "You live in a town all your life, and you get to know every bitch on the street corner and half of them you have already messed around with. You've got the layout of the whole land. You have a picture of where you are.... Since I was raised in L.A., I've always had the geographical and spiritual feeling of being here. I've had time to learn this city. I can't see any other place than L.A."[11]

One critic has described Bukowski's fiction as a "detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free", an image he tried to live up to with sometimes riotous public poetry readings and boorish party behavior.[15] Since his death in 1994, Bukowski has been the subject of a number of critical articles and books about both his life and writings. His work has received relatively little attention from academic critics. ECCO continues to release new collections of his poetry, culled from the thousands of works published in small literary magazines. According to ECCO, the 2007 release The People Look Like Flowers At Last will be his final posthumous release as now all his once-unpublished work has been published.[16]

Bukowski: Born Into This, a film documenting the author's life, was released in 2003. It features contributions from Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton and Bono (U2's song "Dirty Day" was dedicated to Charles Bukowski when released in 1993). Bukowski is known to have disliked Bono, calling him a "millionaire rock-star, a part of the establishment regardless of what he says".

In 1981, the Italian director Marco Ferreri made a film, Tales of Ordinary Madness, based on the short stories of Bukowski. Ben Gazzara played the role of Bukowski's character. Bukowski was said to have disliked the film.

In 1987, the film Barfly was released, starring Mickey Rourke as Henry Chinaski (Bukowski) and Faye Dunaway as Wanda Wilcox (his lover). Sean Penn had offered to play the part of Chinaski (Bukowski) for as little as a dollar as long as his friend Dennis Hopper would provide direction. But the European director Barbet Schroeder had invested many years and thousands of dollars in the project and Bukowski felt Shroeder deserved to make it. Mickey Rourke was ultimately chosen to play Chinaski. During filming Bukowski said of Rourke; "Mickey Rourke is a real human guy, on and off the set. And in Barfly he really came through with the acting. I felt his enjoyment and inventiveness."

A film adaptation of Factotum, starring Matt Dillon, was released in 2005.

In June 2006, Bukowski's literary archive was donated by his widow to the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. Copies of all editions of his work published by the Black Sparrow Press are held at Western Michigan University, which purchased the archive of the publishing house after its closure in 2003.

See also

The True History of C. Bukowski's Leaver (in italian: La Vera Storia del Fegato di C. Bukowski) is the first novel came out in Italy by the young poet Emanuele Podestà.[17]

Works

Novels

Poetry

  • It Catches My Heart in its Hands (1963)
  • The Days run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
  • Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972)
  • Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (1974)
  • Love is a Dog from Hell (1977)
  • Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1979)
  • War All the Time (1984)
  • You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986)
  • The Roominghouse Madrigals (1988)
  • Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems (1990)
  • The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1996)
  • Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories (1996)
  • Bone Palace Ballet (1998)
  • what matters most is how well you walk through the fire. (1999)
  • Open All Night (2000)
  • The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps (2001)
  • Dangling in the Tournefortia (2002)
  • Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way (2003)
  • The Flash of the Lightning Behind the Mountain (2004)
  • Slouching Toward Nirvana (2005)
  • Come On In! (2006)
  • The People Look Like Flowers At Last (2007)
  • The Pleasures of the Damned (2007)
  • The Continual Condition (2009)
  • Absence of the Hero (2010)

Short story collections

  • Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wall (1960)
  • Run With the Hunted (1962)
  • Cold Dogs in the Courtyard (1965)
  • Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts (1965)
  • At Terror Street and Agony Way (1968)
  • A Bukowski Sampler (1969)
  • Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972)
  • South of No North (1973)
  • Hot Water Music (1983)
  • Tales of Ordinary Madness (1983)
  • The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983)
  • All's Normal Here: A Charles Bukowski Primer (1985)
  • Portions from a Wine-stained Notebook: Short Stories and Essays (2008)

Nonfiction

Major Biographies

References

  1. ^ http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v047/47.1dobozy.pdf
  2. ^ http://www.enotes.com/short-story-criticism/bukowski-charles
  3. ^ http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show_comment/362
  4. ^ "Celebrities Who Travel Well". Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,961603-2,00.html. 
  5. ^ a b c d e Miles, Barry. Charles Bukowski.
  6. ^ a b Sounes, Howard. Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, p. 8
  7. ^ Who is Charles Bukowski?
  8. ^ Ham on Rye, pgs. 94-6
  9. '^ 'South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life - HarperCollins.
  10. ^ bukowski.net/timeline
  11. ^ a b Introduction to Charles Bukowski, by Jay Dougherty
  12. ^ Ciotti, Paul. (March 22, 1987) Los Angeles Times Bukowski: He's written more than 40 books, and in Europe he's treated like a rock star. He has dined with Norman Mailer and goes to the race track with Sean Penn. Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway are starring in a movie based on his life. At 66, poet Charles Bukowski is suddenly in vogue. Section: Los Angeles Times Magazine; Page 12.
  13. ^ p.49, Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s Volume 2
  14. ^ Wills, D. 'Saving Bukowski's Bungalow', in Wills, D. (ed.) Beatdom Vol. 2 (Mauling Press: Dundee, 2008) p. 30-33
  15. ^ Boston Review:
  16. ^ Amazon.com: The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems: Charles Bukowski: Books
  17. ^ http://www.mentelocale.it/leggere_scrivere/contenuti/index_html/id_contenuti_varint_23429
  • Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes (Grove Press, 1999)
  • Aaron Krumhansl - A Descriptive Bibliography of the Primary Publications of Charles Bukowski (Black Sparrow Press, 1999)
  • Sanford Dorbin - A Bibliography of Charles Bukowski (Black Sparrow Press, 1969)
  • University of Southern California Department of Special Collections

External links

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