Charles Bukowski

Birth in Germany and arrival in America

Bukowski was born in Andernach, in Germany's Rhineland, on 16 August 1920, and was baptized Heinrich Karl Bukowski later that month. His mother, Katharina Fett, was German. His father, Heinrich Bukowski, was an American serviceman of German and Polish ancestry who had remained in Germany after the First World War. The family emigrated to the United States in 1923, sailing from Bremen to New York before continuing to California, where they lived first with relatives in Pasadena before settling in Los Angeles — the city that would become inseparable from his work.[1][2]

His German birth retained significance throughout his life: he remained widely read in Germany long before he became conventionally famous in America, and he eventually returned to his birthplace as an adult. But Bukowski's Los Angeles was almost never Hollywood's Los Angeles. He wrote instead about rooming houses, cheap apartments, liquor stores, buses, racetracks, downtown streets, factories, post offices, and neighborhoods where people worked because rent was due rather than because work supplied identity or fulfillment. Los Angeles became not simply his setting but one of his principal subjects.

His father and violence at home

Bukowski's childhood was deeply shaped by his father, who demanded obedience and repeatedly beat him with a leather razor strop — sometimes for offenses as small as leaving a single blade of grass uncut while mowing the lawn. Bukowski later transformed these experiences into Ham on Rye, his 1982 autobiographical novel of childhood and adolescence. The violence taught Bukowski an early lesson about authority: people with power often used it simply because they could. His mother, Katharina, was generally unable or unwilling to protect him.[3]

The experience helps explain one of the persistent currents running through Bukowski's work. Teachers, bosses, supervisors, police officers, editors, landlords, fathers, and institutions continually attempt to impose rules upon individuals. Bukowski's characters rarely believe these authorities possess any inherent moral superiority. Resistance might accomplish nothing. But submission is worse.

Acne, loneliness and the discovery of alcohol

Adolescence brought another source of humiliation. Bukowski developed an unusually severe case of acne vulgaris, with painful boils and lesions covering much of his face and body; the treatment itself could be painful, and the condition left permanent scarring. Already shy, awkward and frequently bullied, he became still more isolated, and he later wrote openly about being rejected by girls and feeling physically grotesque. The future public performer famous for drinking in front of crowds grew from a teenager who often preferred hiding from them.[3]

Around thirteen, however, a friend introduced him to alcohol in the friend's father's wine cellar. Bukowski remembered the effect almost as a revelation: drinking temporarily silenced the fear and self-consciousness that otherwise dominated social situations. Alcohol would remain both pleasure and catastrophe for the rest of his life.

Libraries and becoming a reader

Bukowski's other escape was the Los Angeles Public Library. He was not temperamentally suited to formal academic life, but he became an obsessive independent reader, and he later described pulling books from library shelves hoping to find writers who sounded genuinely alive rather than merely respectable. He read hard and unfashionably — John Fante, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sherwood Anderson, the early Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, and Chinese poets such as Li Po — and late in life he summarized his literary ancestry in a letter:

I once read almost everything. My influences are Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hamsun, Céline, Jeffers, Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Gorky.[4]

Dostoevsky came first on Bukowski's own list. His characters' humiliation, irrationality, poverty, gambling, desperation, and sudden psychological reversals offered an obvious model for a writer interested in people whose behavior refused respectable explanations. Hamsun's Hunger was especially important: the novel follows an impoverished, proud, self-destructive would-be writer wandering through Kristiania while poverty and his own irrational behavior repeatedly sabotage him.

The connection from Hamsun to Bukowski would later run through another writer. Bukowski discovered John Fante's [Ask the Dust](book:ask-the-dust) in the library and experienced one of the decisive literary recognitions of his life. Fante's Arturo Bandini — a fictional creation — was a poor, arrogant, funny, lonely aspiring writer wandering Depression-era Los Angeles, convinced of his own literary destiny while routinely humiliating himself. Bukowski recognized a literary world much closer to his own life than the polished fiction he had been reading, and he eventually called Fante his literary “god.” Decades later, once Bukowski had become successful, he told John Martin about the nearly forgotten book, and Black Sparrow brought Ask the Dust back into print in 1980 with Bukowski's introduction — one of the major forces behind Fante's rediscovery. The literary lineage is unusually clear: Knut Hamsun to John Fante to Charles Bukowski.

Céline provided another crucial model. [Journey to the End of the Night](book:journey-to-the-end-of-the-night) demonstrated that vulgar speech, poverty, disgust, dark comedy, urban life, and contempt for respectable illusions could sustain major literature; of the writers Bukowski named himself, Céline is perhaps the closest stylistic relative to his low-life first-person fiction. Hemingway offered another lesson: the short, flat sentence. Bukowski spent decades mocking Hemingway's mythology and criticizing aspects of his writing, but the debt remained visible. Admiration and antagonism could coexist.

College, New York and the first publications

Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, studying journalism and related subjects without completing a degree. After the United States entered the Second World War he left Los Angeles and began wandering: New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlanta and other cities became part of the life he later transformed into Factotum. He worked whatever jobs he could find — warehouses, factories, stockrooms, shipping departments, service work — positions that seemed designed primarily to exchange a worker's finite hours for enough money to survive until the next shift.[5]

Bukowski's first significant professional publication came in the March–April 1944 issue of Story, edited by Whit Burnett, which printed his short story “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip” — an appropriate title for a writer who had already accumulated a substantial collection of rejection notices. A second publication followed. Then almost nothing. By 1946, Bukowski had become discouraged enough by rejection that he later described himself as having given up on a literary career, and a decade of heavy drinking followed.

The story became part of Bukowski's mythology: the young writer abandons literature, disappears into bars and cheap rooms, survives bad work and bad relationships, and eventually returns to writing carrying all of that experience with him. As with most Bukowski mythology, the reality was somewhat less tidy — he had not magically stopped thinking like a writer. But he did largely disappear from professional literary publication. A serious health crisis eventually interrupted those years of drinking.

In 1954, Bukowski suffered a severe internal hemorrhage caused by a bleeding ulcer and spent approximately nine days in Los Angeles County Hospital. He believed he had nearly died. Afterward, he returned intensely to writing, particularly poetry, and at roughly thirty-five began the literary phase that would continue until his death. Little magazines gradually started accepting the poems. The first book followed in October 1960, when Hearse Press published Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail in an edition of only about 200 copies.

Jane and the women behind the books

Bukowski's relationships became another major source of material. One of the most important was Jane Cooney Baker, an older woman with whom he had an intense and destructive relationship through the 1940s and 1950s; her drinking matched or exceeded his own. Her death in 1962 affected Bukowski deeply, and versions of Jane recur throughout his poetry and fiction.

He briefly married the poet and editor Barbara Frye in the 1950s. Later he became involved with the poet Frances Smith; their daughter, Marina Louise Bukowski, was born on 7 September 1964. Other relationships — including those with the poet and sculptor Linda King, Pamela “Cupcakes” Miller, and later Linda Lee Beighle — would likewise enter the fiction.

Bukowski's transformation of real women into literary characters remains one of the most contested aspects of his work. The portrayals can be tender, funny, vicious, sexually explicit, selfish, and cruel. The books make little attempt to protect either Bukowski or the people around him.

The Post Office

The longest period of conventional employment in Bukowski's life came from the United States Postal Service. He worked first as a substitute letter carrier and later, beginning in the late 1950s, as a postal clerk at the Terminal Annex downtown. The stability helped him pay rent and child support but exhausted him.[6]

Bukowski was not simply complaining that work was difficult. His deeper objection was that institutional work consumed time, and time was the one resource that could not be recovered. Managers, disciplinary hearings, schedules, supervisors, repetitive sorting, attendance rules, and endless regulations became material for the novel Post Office. Before he could write it, however, somebody had to make leaving possible.

A hundred dollars a month

That person was John Martin, a Los Angeles office-supply manager and serious rare-book collector who had discovered Bukowski's poetry in small magazines and become convinced he was dealing with an important American writer. The two began corresponding in 1965 and met the following year. In 1965 Martin sold his valuable private book collection to the University of California, Santa Barbara for $50,000, using the money to help establish what became Black Sparrow Press; he continued working his day job while developing the press, and he began publishing Bukowski.[7]

By 1969 Bukowski was forty-nine and still working nights at the post office. Martin made him an extraordinary offer: leave the Post Office and write full time, and Martin would guarantee him $100 a month. Martin was himself earning about $500 a month at his office-supply job when the arrangement began — meaning he was essentially offering Bukowski a fifth of his own salary. Bukowski calculated his minimal expenses and accepted. He left the post office in early 1970, and within weeks Martin received the manuscript of Bukowski's first novel.[8]

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Before his novels made him internationally famous, Bukowski reached readers through newspapers. Beginning in the late 1960s he wrote the column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” for the underground newspaper Open City, and when that publication disappeared, the column continued elsewhere, including the Los Angeles Free Press.

The form suited him perfectly: he could mix autobiography, fiction, drunken anecdote, satire, sex, neighborhood observation, rage, and deliberately unreliable storytelling without worrying about conventional literary structure. The pieces helped create the public “dirty old man” persona that became both useful and burdensome. Bukowski had found a character he could sell. The problem was that the character was himself.

Post Office and Henry Chinaski

Post Office appeared in 1971. Its narrator, Henry Chinaski, became Bukowski's fictional alter ego — not precisely Charles Bukowski, but Bukowski simplified, exaggerated, reordered, and made available for repeated literary use. Through him, Bukowski could turn different periods of his own life into a loose autobiographical sequence:

• Ham on Rye — childhood and adolescence
• Factotum — wandering through wartime America and moving from job to job
• Post Office — postal employment
• Women — literary fame and relationships
• Hollywood — making the film Barfly

The novels should not be read as literal autobiography. Chronology changes, people are combined, events are exaggerated, and comic invention frequently overtakes documentary accuracy. But the emotional and experiential foundation is unmistakably Bukowski's. He was writing autobiographical fiction, not sworn testimony.

Factotum

Factotum followed in 1975. It returns to wartime America and follows Chinaski from one abandoned job to another. He works because he has to, quits because he can, gets fired, drinks, finds another job, loses that one, and moves on.[9]

The novel presents work without the usual American mythology surrounding it. Jobs do not build character. Employment does not necessarily confer dignity. The person performing a task may know perfectly well that the task is pointless. Bukowski's subject is what happens when somebody needs money badly enough to work but never badly enough to believe in the work.

Writing style

Bukowski developed one of the most immediately recognizable styles in modern American literature. His style is deceptively simple, relying heavily on short declarative sentences, ordinary and colloquial vocabulary, spoken rhythms, direct dialogue, black humor, autobiographical anecdote, abrupt transitions, and minimal exposition.

His poetry often arranges similarly straightforward language into narrow lines, creating an impression of speed and terseness even when the language itself is sentimental or conversational. He generally resisted elaborate metaphor and what he considered literary showing-off, preferring concrete incidents, recognizable voices, and the rhythms of ordinary speech.

Bukowski's characteristic effect, however, depends heavily on timing. A scene may begin as an ordinary or mundane anecdote, become funny, then cruel or grotesque, and end unexpectedly in sadness or tenderness — often before the emotion has time to become comfortable. Some of his best writing depends on these abrupt shifts in tone.

The apparent simplicity should not be mistaken for accident or lack of craft. Bukowski revised his work, submitted constantly, maintained an enormous correspondence with editors, and wrote across several decades with remarkable persistence. His long publishing career, surviving manuscripts, and extensive correspondence reveal sustained literary discipline behind prose that often gives the impression of simply recording whatever happened to him. His apparent casualness was itself a carefully developed style.

Humor, masculinity and the persona

Bukowski eventually created a public character almost as recognizable as Chinaski: the dirty old man. He drank, he gambled, he insulted people, he fought, he wrote about sex, and he claimed not to care what literary society thought of him. The persona was useful — it sold books.

His reputation has always been contested. The writing contains misogyny, violence, degrading sexual language, drunkenness, and male fantasies that many readers find repellent. Some critics interpret the exaggerated masculinity as partly satirical — Chinaski is often ridiculous, selfish, frightened, physically failing, jealous, and defeated rather than heroic. Other readers argue that satire does not erase the cruelty of the portrayals. Both responses are part of Bukowski's critical history.

What is difficult to deny is that the persona increasingly obscured the private writer who spent enormous amounts of time alone, listened obsessively to classical music, cared deeply about cats, wrote thousands of letters, revised his work, worried about death, and maintained an enormous working discipline. The public image of the drinker was not invented, but neither was the private discipline of the writer.

One part of Bukowski's life the public caricature often ignores is his deep love of classical music. He listened while writing: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Mozart, Sibelius, Shostakovich and other composers appear throughout his poems and letters. The music provided another model for artistic seriousness. Bukowski could spend an afternoon at the racetrack and a night drinking beer, then return home and type while listening to Mahler. There was no contradiction in his mind. The two versions are the same man.

Charles Bukowski's Connection to Paris

Bukowski never lived in Paris. His connection to the city is one documented week in September 1978, an hour of live television that France has been replaying ever since, and a long working relationship with a Paris-based filmmaker that outlasted the trip by a decade.

Famous in Europe first

Bukowski's reputation arrived from what seemed to American literary culture like the wrong direction. He became particularly successful in Germany, the country of his birth. France became especially important in 1977 and 1978, when competing French publishers began translating and promoting him: editions from Les Humanoïdes Associés and Le Sagittaire — including Contes de la folie ordinaire, “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” and L'Amour est un chien de l'enfer — established Bukowski for French readers before he had comparable mainstream prestige in the United States. French publishers treated him less like an obscure American small-press poet and more like a cult celebrity. That reputation brought him to Paris.[10]

Bukowski never lived in Paris like Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, or William S. Burroughs. But describing his Paris connection as simply one hour on French television understates what happened. His most famous public appearance in Paris lasted about an hour; his documented Paris stay lasted roughly a week. In September 1978, Bukowski came to France with Linda Lee and the photographer Michael Montfort for an intense promotional trip organized around the growing French readership of his work, and the week ultimately gave Paris a surprisingly complete little Bukowski itinerary.

Hôtel des Saints-Pères

Bukowski and Linda Lee stayed at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères, 65 rue des Saints-Pères, in the sixth arrondissement — the hotel still operates at the same address. Instead of allowing Bukowski to enjoy Paris quietly, his publishers arranged an exhausting series of press interviews; the publisher Raphaël Sorin later recalled that Bukowski was kept almost continuously occupied with journalists for about eight days, and many of the interviews took place inside the hotel itself.[11]

One of the most memorable was with the French underground writer and journalist Alain Pacadis, who placed a portable cassette recorder on a table in the hotel's patio, ordered beer, and talked with Bukowski about alcohol, drugs, prostitutes, music, celebrity and the forthcoming television appearance. Bukowski joked that he planned to drink heavily on television. It turned out not to be much of a joke. The hotel functioned as his base for the entire promotional week, which gives it a much stronger place in Bukowski's Paris story than the television studio alone.[11]

Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 22 September 1978

On the day of the television broadcast, Bukowski escaped the publicity schedule long enough to walk through Saint-Germain-des-Prés with the photographer Sophie Bassouls. The Bibliothèque nationale de France preserves Bassouls's photographs of Bukowski from that exact date, 22 September 1978.[12]

Bassouls later remembered Bukowski becoming unexpectedly emotional about the literary history of the neighborhood. He was particularly interested in places associated with Ernest Hemingway, whose Paris mythology clearly meant something to him even though Bukowski could be dismissive of Hemingway as a writer. The image is interesting because Bukowski's public persona depended partly upon contempt for literary pretension; yet in Paris he was visibly conscious of walking through the physical landscape occupied by earlier writers.

During the walk, Bukowski and Bassouls stopped at Le Rouquet, 188 boulevard Saint-Germain, where Bukowski drank white wine — Bassouls remembered one glass, perhaps two. The café survives, and the evidence for the visit is unusually specific: a named café, a known date, a photographer who was physically accompanying him, and surviving photographs from the outing.[11]

They continued toward Place Saint-Sulpice and the Église Saint-Sulpice. Bassouls remembered Bukowski as a poor walker — not because the route was difficult, but because he constantly stopped to inspect whatever caught his attention. From there they went to the apartment of the Le Monde literary critic Edgar Reichmann for yet another interview, during which a bottle of whisky reportedly disappeared rapidly. Bukowski still had a live television program to do that evening. The walk offers a much quieter Paris Bukowski than the television footage that later swallowed the entire trip. The calm afternoon in Saint-Germain contrasted sharply with the chaotic Apostrophes appearance that followed only a few hours later.

Apostrophes, 22 September 1978

That evening Bukowski sat down on the set of Apostrophes, the weekly books program presented by the journalist Bernard Pivot — broadcast live on Antenne 2 from the rue Cognacq-Jay studios in the seventh arrondissement on Friday, 22 September 1978, beginning at 21:40 and running about seventy-five minutes. The Institut national de l'audiovisuel records the episode under the title En marge de la société ? and lists the guests: Charles Bukowski, Marcel Mermoz, Gaston Ferdière, Catherine Paysan and François Cavanna.[13]

The INA catalogue itself labels the episode with the descriptor “incident (Bukowski drunk)” and records that he drank heavily during the broadcast and ended the program intoxicated. Early in the program he was capable of discussing his work coherently, including his attempt to make ugly realities interesting through writing. As the broadcast continued he drank, interrupted the other guests, and became increasingly difficult to translate. The novelist Catherine Paysan found herself sitting beside him; he put a hand on or near her knee, and she responded: “Ça, c'est le pompon” — roughly, “well, that takes the biscuit.” The writer François Cavanna, increasingly infuriated by Bukowski interrupting the discussion, tried to silence him. Then came the line that entered French television history:[14]

Bukowski! I'm going to put my fist in your face!

Bukowski ! Je vais te foutre mon poing dans la gueule ![13]

Bukowski eventually removed his earpiece, stood with difficulty, and left the set before the program had finished. The broadcast immediately became part of his mythology. Bernard Pivot himself never forgot the episode: he dated it precisely when looking back over his career and continued retelling the Bukowski encounter long afterward. The clip has become one of the most replayed episodes in the history of French literary television.[15][16]

What the record holds, and what it does not

The story has been improved in the retelling for nearly fifty years, and that distinction is worth preserving. Later accounts add details: three bottles of white wine or Sancerre, or bottles of Alsatian white brought to the studio; Bukowski drinking directly from the bottle; Pivot ordering him removed; a confrontation with security outside; Bukowski producing a small pocketknife — a gesture the publisher Raphaël Sorin, who told the story, characterized as largely theatrical. Some of these details come from named participants and therefore should not simply be dismissed. But they are not all equivalent kinds of evidence.

The safest core of the story comes from the surviving broadcast and the INA documentation: Bukowski drank heavily; he became visibly intoxicated; he behaved intrusively toward Catherine Paysan; Cavanna angrily told him to be quiet and threatened to punch him; Bukowski removed his earpiece; and he left before the program was over. The knife and the count of bottles belong to later eyewitness recollections rather than the television archive itself — even whether Bukowski technically walked off or was removed shifts depending upon who is telling the story. Those distinctions are worth preserving rather than collapsing fifty years of retelling into one dramatic anecdote.[14]

La Coupole

Bukowski's night did not end with Apostrophes. While Pivot's television team reportedly went to Brasserie Lipp, Bukowski's group headed across Paris to La Coupole, the famous brasserie at 102 boulevard du Montparnasse, joined by Jean-François Bizot — founder of the magazine Actuel and one of Bukowski's earliest French translators. According to people interviewed about the night, at around 2 a.m. customers gave Bukowski a standing ovation. The television disaster had effectively made him a celebrity overnight.[11]

The episode contains a peculiar reversal. Bukowski had spent decades being rejected by respectable literary culture. Then he appeared drunk on the most prestigious literary television program in France, behaved horribly, walked off, went drinking in Montparnasse — and was applauded.

Shakespeare Never Did This

The European travel became Shakespeare Never Did This, originally published by City Lights in 1979 with photographs by Michael Montfort. The book mixes travel writing, autobiography, photographs, publishers, readings, drinking, hotel rooms, France, Germany, and Bukowski's return to his birthplace of Andernach.

There is one chronological wrinkle worth keeping clear. Bukowski made an earlier trip to Germany in 1978, and the book telescopes or combines material from more than one European journey that year — the narrative can make separate trips feel like a single seamless France-to-Germany itinerary. So the safest formulation is that the September 1978 Paris promotional visit became part of the material collected in Shakespeare Never Did This. Paris remains firmly documented; the exact travel chronology simply should not be flattened unnecessarily.

Barbet Schroeder and the French connection

Bukowski's relationship with France did not end when he flew home. The Paris-based filmmaker Barbet Schroeder became fascinated by Bukowski and spent years attempting to finance a feature film built around his screenplay. During that period, Schroeder repeatedly filmed Bukowski talking about literature, sex, violence, women, drinking, death, childhood, work, and writing.

Those recordings became The Charles Bukowski Tapes, a French production of fifty filmed segments totaling nearly four hours, created from Schroeder's extended conversations with Bukowski while the two were developing Barfly. The collaboration eventually produced Barfly in 1987, and the Centre Pompidou later screened The Charles Bukowski Tapes as part of its Schroeder retrospective — another substantial connection to French cultural life beyond the notorious television appearance.[17]

Women

The same year as the Paris trip, Bukowski published Women. The novel follows Chinaski after literary recognition has transformed his circumstances. He is no longer the ignored postal employee: women know who he is, readers invite him places, he gives poetry readings, he has money. The irony is that success does not make him better at living.

The novel's sexual politics remain deeply controversial, but Women is crucial to understanding the later Bukowski because it asks what happens when a persona built around failure suddenly succeeds.

Ham on Rye

Ham on Rye, published in 1982, returned to Bukowski's childhood and adolescence. The novel describes paternal violence, economic insecurity, school, bullying, acne, alienation, sexuality, and the discovery of alcohol.[18]

It is often regarded as one of his strongest novels because it provides the psychological background for the adult Chinaski persona. The aggressive, hard-drinking outsider of the later books emerges from a frightened and isolated child attempting to protect himself from humiliation.

Linda Lee and San Pedro

Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle in 1976. She ran a health-food restaurant and had interests dramatically different from the self-destructive world associated with Bukowski, but the relationship endured and became the most stable partnership of his later life. Around 1980 Bukowski moved to San Pedro, the harbor district at the southern end of Los Angeles, where he enjoyed considerably more financial security than he had during the De Longpre Avenue years: a better house, a BMW, better wine, and eventually a computer in place of the manual typewriter.

But the basic literary world remained intact — racetracks, cats, writers, drinking, age, death, work, women, and the persistent mystery of why some people keep creating while others stop. Bukowski and Linda Lee married in 1985.

Barfly and Hollywood

Bukowski had begun developing a screenplay with Barbet Schroeder around the end of the 1970s, fictionalizing his early Los Angeles drinking life through Henry Chinaski. Funding took years. At one point Sean Penn wanted to play Chinaski but insisted that Dennis Hopper direct; Bukowski refused to abandon Schroeder, who had spent years trying to get the picture made. The eventual film starred Mickey Rourke as Henry and Faye Dunaway as Wanda, with Bukowski himself making a brief appearance. Barfly was released in 1987 and brought Bukowski to a much larger mainstream audience.

He then performed the most Bukowskian maneuver possible: he turned the irritating experience of watching Hollywood make a film about his own life into another autobiographical novel. Hollywood appeared in 1989.

The private discipline behind the myth

By this point, the contradiction between Bukowski's image and his actual working life had become enormous. The persona suggested chaos; the bibliography suggests discipline. He wrote constantly — letters, poems, stories, novels, columns, screenplays, thousands upon thousands of pages. His partnership with Black Sparrow lasted for the rest of his life.

When John Martin retired in 2002, the rights to Bukowski, John Fante, and Paul Bowles were sold to Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, and much of the remainder of the Black Sparrow backlist went to the publisher David R. Godine. Black Sparrow's list was divided among publishers in 2002 rather than simply sold wholesale to one New York house.

Aging

Bukowski continued writing into old age. His later poetry is often quieter than the work that established the legend. Cats appear constantly; so do mortality, memory, writing itself, old friends, horse racing, classical music, his computer, and astonishment at having survived. The body becomes unreliable, fame becomes absurd. The racetrack remains, the music remains, writing remains.

The writer who had once seemed determined to kill himself through alcohol became surprisingly interested in staying alive. The Last Night of the Earth Poems appeared in 1992 and contains some of his strongest writing about age and mortality.

Death

Bukowski developed leukemia during his final years and fought it for approximately a year, continuing to write while undergoing treatment. He had recently completed his final novel, Pulp — an eccentric parody of detective fiction in which death itself becomes one of the principal characters. He died at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital in California on 9 March 1994, aged seventy-three, and Pulp appeared the same year. His funeral incorporated Buddhist rites, arranged by Linda Lee, and he was buried at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes, overlooking the Los Angeles harbor region. His gravestone bears the words:[19]

DON'T TRY.

The phrase is often misunderstood as advice not to work. Bukowski meant almost the opposite: creation should not be forced as a performance, and if the impulse was genuine, it would become unavoidable. Few biographies make the point as forcefully as his own. He spent decades rejected, unpublished, badly paid, scarred, drunk, employed in jobs he hated, and convinced that nobody important was waiting for him. He kept writing anyway.

Influence and legacy

Bukowski's reputation remains divided. To admirers, he removed literary pretension from poetry and made room for lives that American literature routinely ignored. To detractors, the simplicity can become simplistic, the drunken persona repetitive, and the sexual politics deeply ugly. The debate has not diminished his readership. His influence appears throughout underground poetry, spoken-word culture, autobiographical fiction, alternative publishing, music, and later writing about working-class life — the writer Sesshu Foster has described encountering Bukowski's work as a young writer and recognizing in it the violent, indifferent Los Angeles he himself knew — and his cultural admirers extended well beyond literature, to Tom Waits, Sean Penn, Bono, Harry Dean Stanton, and numerous musicians and actors.[18]

Bukowski is also routinely linked with dirty realism, although the label fits imperfectly: his work shares the movement's stripped language and focus on ordinary lives, but his exaggerated persona, grotesque comedy, and lyrical sentimentality often make him much less minimalist than writers such as Raymond Carver. His influence is easy to imitate badly — thousands of writers copied the alcohol, short lines, profanity, sex, and apparent casualness. What was harder to reproduce was the timing: Bukowski could make a joke turn into grief in a sentence.

Perhaps his most important literary legacy is the proof that subject matter does not become literature because it is respectable. A post office can be literature. A cheap room can be literature. A horse race can be literature. A factory can be literature. Being broke can be literature. So can embarrassment. Bukowski's art depended upon the belief that nothing human became unworthy of writing merely because polite culture preferred not to look at it.

There is an irony in what happened afterward. In 2006 Linda Lee Bukowski donated a major collection of his papers to the Huntington Library, and in 2010 the Huntington mounted a major Bukowski exhibition — thousands of pieces of manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, drawings, books, and personal objects inside one of America's major research libraries. The outsider became an archive. The failed writer became a bestseller. The postal clerk became required reading. And the man who thought nobody wanted him arrived in Paris and discovered that an entire country was waiting.

Charles Bukowski's books

Bukowski published for thirty-four years, most of it with the small Los Angeles house Black Sparrow Press, and the catalogue below is the whole of it: six novels, more than forty books of poetry, the columns and stories, the letters, and a long tail of chapbooks printed in editions of a few hundred. The books with pages here are linked; the rest are listed for the record.[20]

Novels

• Post Office — 1971
• Factotum — 1975
• Women — 1978
• Ham on Rye — 1982
• Hollywood — 1989
• Pulp — 1994

Poetry collections published in his lifetime

• Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail — 1960
• It Catches My Heart in Its Hands — 1963
• Crucifix in a Deathhand — 1965
• At Terror Street and Agony Way — 1968
• Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window — 1968
• The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills — 1969
• Fire Station — 1970
• Mockingbird Wish Me Luck — 1972
• Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974–1977 — 1977
• Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit — 1979
• Dangling in the Tournefortia — 1981
• War All the Time: Poems 1981–1984 — 1984
• You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense — 1986
• People Poems — 1991
• The Last Night of the Earth Poems — 1992

Poetry collections published after his death

• Bone Palace Ballet — 1997
• What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire — 1999
• Open All Night — 2000
• The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps — 2001
• Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way — 2003
• The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain — 2004
• Slouching Toward Nirvana — 2005
• Come On In!: New Poems — 2006
• The People Look Like Flowers at Last — 2007
• The Continual Condition — 2009
• Storm for the Living and the Dead: Uncollected and Unpublished Poems — 2017

Short stories, columns and prose

• Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts — 1965
• All the Assholes in the World and Mine — 1966
• Notes of a Dirty Old Man — 1969
• Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness — 1972
• South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life — 1973
• Bring Me Your Love — 1983
• Hot Water Music — 1983
• The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories — 1983
• Tales of Ordinary Madness — 1983
• There's No Business — 1984
• The Day It Snowed in L.A.: The Adventures of Clarence Hiram Sweetmeat — 1986
• Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944–1990 — 2008
• Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays, Volume 2: 1946–1992 — 2010
• More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns — 2011
• The Bell Tolls for No One — 2015

Mixed poetry and prose

• A Bukowski Sampler — 1969
• Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems — 1990
• Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories — 1996

Letters and correspondence

• The Bukowski/Purdy Letters: A Decade of Dialogue, 1964–1974 — 1983
• Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960–1970 — 1993
• Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s–1970s — 1995
• Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978–1994 — 1999
• Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960–1967 — 2001
• Los Angeles–Andernach: Letters to Uncle Heinrich — 2004

Travel, memoir and diaries

• Shakespeare Never Did This — 1979; expanded edition 1995
• The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship — 1997; trade edition 1998

Essays, interviews and writing about writing

• On Writing — 2015
• The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing — 2018
• Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963–1993 — 2003

Screenplays and film writing

• Barfly — 1984, the screenplay
• The Movie: “Barfly” — 1987

Selected poetry and readers

These volumes select or reorganize previously published material rather than representing entirely new bodies of work.

• Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955–1973 — 1974
• The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946–1966 — 1988
• Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader — 1993
• The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951–1993 — 2007
• Essential Bukowski: Poetry — 2016

Thematic collections

These later collections gather Bukowski's poetry and prose around particular subjects.

• On Cats — 2015
• On Love — 2016
• On Drinking — 2019

Early and limited-edition chapbooks

Small-press pamphlets and broadsides, most printed in editions of a few hundred and many of them now collector's items rather than reading copies.

Other publications

Photography and artist books

• The Wedding — 1986
• Bukowski Photographs 1977–1987 — 1987
• Bukowski Photographs 1977–1991 — 1993
• The Cruelty of Loveless Love — 2001

Manuscript and facsimile volumes

• Back to the Machinegun: Manuscripts, Volume 1, 1959–1974 — 2011
• Back to the Machinegun: Manuscripts, Volume 2, 1975–1977 — 2014
• Back to the Machinegun: Manuscripts, Volume 3, 1978–1980 — 2014

Books shared with other writers

• Penguin Modern Poets 13 — 1969, with Philip Lamantia and Harold Norse
• Me and Your Sometimes Love Poems — 1972, with Linda King
• Prying — 1997, with Jack Micheline and Catfish McDaris