Biographies

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 Poemsfor 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

Charles Bukowski was a prolific underground writer who depicted the depraved metropolitan environments of the down-trodden members of American society in his poetry and prose. A cult hero, Bukowski relied on experience, emotion, and imagination in his works, often using direct language and violent and sexual imagery. While some critics find his style offensive, others claim that Bukowski is satirizing the machismo attitude through his routine use of sex, alcohol abuse, and violence. "Without trying to make himself look good, much less heroic, Bukowski writes with a nothing-to-lose truthfulness which sets him apart from most other `autobiographical' novelists and poets," points out Stephen Kessler in the San Francisco Review of Books, adding: "Firmly in the American tradition of the maverick, Bukowski writes with no apologies from the frayed edge of society, beyond or beneath respectability, revealing nasty and alarming underviews." Michael Lally, writing in Village Voice, maintains that "Bukowski is ... a phenomenon. He has established himself as a writer with a consistent and insistent style based on what he projects as his `personality,' the result of hard, intense living."

Bukowski has "a sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids and a dominating nose that looks as if it were assembled in a junkyard from Studebaker hoods and Buick fenders," describes Paul Ciotti in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. "Yet his voice is so soft and bemused that it's hard to take him seriously when he says: `I don't like people. I don't even like myself. There must be something wrong with me.'" Born in Germany, Bukowski was brought to the United States at the age of two. His father believed in firm discipline and often beat Bukowski for the smallest offenses. A slight child, Bukowski was also bullied by boys his own age, and was frequently rejected by girls because of his bad complexion. "When Bukowski was 13," writes Ciotti, "one of [his friends] invited him to his father's wine cellar and served him his first drink of alcohol. `It was magic,' Bukowski would later write. `Why hadn't someone told me?'"

In 1939, Bukowski began attending Los Angeles City College, dropping out at the beginning of World War II and moving to New York to become a writer. The next few years were spent writing and traveling and collecting a pile of rejection slips. By 1946 Bukowski had decided to give up his writing aspirations, and what followed was a binge that took him all over the world and lasted for approximately ten years. Ending up near death, Bukowski's life changed and he started writing again. "If a writer must sample life at its most elemental, then surely Bukowski qualifies as a laureate of poetic preparedness," observes Bob Graalman in the Dictionary of Literary Biography; Bukowski's many jobs over the years have included stock boy, dishwasher, postal clerk, and factory worker. He did not begin his professional writing career until the age of thirty-five, and like other contemporaries, Bukowski began by publishing in underground newspapers, especially his local papers Open City and the L.A. Free Press. "It is tempting to make correlations between [Bukowski's] emergence in Los Angeles literary circles and the arrival of the 1960s, when poets were still shaking hands with Allen Ginsberg and other poets of his generation while younger activist poets tapped on their shoulders, begging for an introduction," explains Graalman. "Bukowski cultivated his obvious link to both eras--the blackness and despair of the 1950s with the rebellious cry of the 1960s for freedom."

"Published by small, underground presses and ephemeral mimeographed little magazines," describes Jay Dougherty in Contemporary Novelists, "Bukowski has gained popularity, in a sense, through word of mouth." Many of his fans regard him as one of the best of the Meat School poets, who are known for their tough and direct masculine writing. "The main character in his poems and short stories, which are largely autobiographical, is usually a down-and-out writer [Henry Chinaski] who spends his time working at marginal jobs (and getting fired from them), getting drunk and making love with a succession of bimbos and floozies," relates Ciotti. "Otherwise, he hangs out with fellow losers--whores, pimps, alcoholics, drifters, the people who lose their rent money at the race track, leave notes of goodby on dressers and have flat tires on the freeway at 3 a.m."

Since his first book of poetry was published in 1959, Bukowski has written over forty others. Ciotti maintains: "Right from the beginning, Bukowski knew that if a poet wants to be read, he has to be noticed first. `So,' he once said, `I got my act up. I wrote vile (but interesting) stuff that made people hate me, that made them curious about this Bukowski. I threw bodies off my porch into the night. I sneered at hippies. I was in and out of drunk tanks. A lady accused me of rape.'"

Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, Bukowski's first book of poetry, covers the major interests and themes that occupy many of his works, the most important being "the sense of a desolate, abandoned world," as R. R. Cuscaden points out in the Outsider. In addition to this sense of desolation, Bukowski also fills his free verse with all the absurdities of life, especially in relation to death. "Bukowski's world, scored and grooved by the impersonal instruments of civilized industrial society, by 20th-century knowledge and experience, remains essentially a world in which meditation and analysis have little part," asserts John William Corrington in Northwest Review. Among the subjects used to present this bleak world are drinking, sex, gambling, and music. The actual style of these numerous poems, however, has its virtues, including "a crisp, hard voice; an excellent ear and eye for measuring out the lengths of lines; and an avoidance of metaphor where a lively anecdote will do the same dramatic work," maintains Ken Tucker in Village Voice.

It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, published in 1963, collects poetry written by Bukowski between the years of 1955 and 1963. "Individual poems merge to form together a body of work unrivalled in kind and very nearly unequalled in quality by Bukowski's contemporaries," states Corrington. The poems touch on topics that are familiar to Bukowski, such as rerolling cigarette butts, the horse that came in, a hundred-dollar call girl, and a rumpled hitchhiker on his way to nowhere. It Catches My Heart in Its Hands contains poems which "are energetic, tough, and unnerving," relates Dabney Stuart in Poetry. And Kenneth Rexroth asserts in the New York Times Book Review that Bukowski "belongs in the small company of poets of real, not literary, alienation."

Bukowski's more recent poetry, such as Dangling in the Tournefortia, published in 1982, continues along the same vein as his first collection. "Low-life bard of Los Angeles, Mr. Bukowski has nothing new for us here," observes Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times Book Review, "simply more and still more accounts in free verse of his follies with alcohol and women and of fellow losers hitting bottom and somehow discovering new ways to continue falling." Despite the subject matter, though, Schjeldahl finds himself enjoying the poems in Dangling in the Tournefortia. "Bukowski writes well," he continues, "with ear-pleasing cadences, wit and perfect clarity, which are all the more beguiling for issuing from a stumblebum persona. His grace with words gives a comic gleam to even his meanest revelations." William Logan, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, concludes: "Life here has almost entirely mastered art."

Similar to his poetry in subject matter, Bukowski's short stories also deal with sex, violence, and the absurdities of life. In his first collection of short stories, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, later abridged and published as Life and Death in the Charity Ward, Bukowski "writes as an unregenerate lowbrow contemptuous of our claims to superior being," describes Thomas R. Edwards in the New York Review of Books. On the other hand, Peter Ackroyd maintains in the Spectator, "A dull character finally emerges, and it is a dullness which spreads through these stories like a stain." Thomas, however, concludes that "in some of these sad and funny stories [Bukowski's] status as a relic isn't wholly without its sanctity."

The protagonists in the stories in Hot Water Music, published in 1983, live in cheap hotels and are often struggling underground writers, similar to Bukowski himself. Bukowski's main autobiographical figure is Henry Chinaski, who appears in a few of these stories and in many of his novels. Among the semi-autobiographical stories in this collection are two which deal with events following the funeral of Bukowski's father. The other stories deal with numerous violent acts, including a jealous wife shooting her husband over an old infidelity, a drunk bank manager molesting young children, a former stripper mutilating the man she is seducing, and a young man who gets over his impotence by raping a neighbor in his apartment elevator. "Lives of quiet desperation explode in apparently random and unmotivated acts of bizarre violence," describes Michael F. Harper in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, adding: "There is certainly a raw power in these stories, but Bukowski's hard-boiled fatalism seems to me the flip side of the humanism he denies and therefore just as false as the sentimentality he ridicules." Erling Friis-Baastad, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, concludes, "In his best work, Bukowski comes close to making us comprehend, if not the sense of it all, then at least its intensity. He cannot forget, and he will not let us forget, that every morning at 3 a.m. broken people lie `in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.'"

Bukowski continues his examination of "broken people" in such novels as Post Office and Ham on Rye. In Post Office, Henry Chinaski is very similar to ex-postman Bukowski; he is a remorseless drunk and womanizer who spends a lot of time at the race track. Chinaski also has to deal with his monotonous and strenuous job, as well as a number of harassing supervisors. Eventually marrying a rich nymphomaniac from Texas, Chinaski is inevitably dumped for another man and finds himself back at the post office. "Bukowski's loser's string of anecdotes, convulsively funny and also sad, is unflagging entertainment but in the end doesn't add up to more than the sum of its parts, somehow missing the novelist's alchemy," asserts a Times Literary Supplement contributor. But Valentine Cunningham, also writing in the Times Literary Supplement, sees the novel as a success: "Pressed in by Post Office bureaucrats, their mean-minded regulations and their heaps of paperwork, the misfit [Chinaski] looks frequently like an angel of light. His refusal to play respectability ball with the cajoling, abusive, never-take-no-for-an- answer loops who own the mailboxes he attends ... can make even this ribald mess of a wretch seem a shining haven of sanity in the prevailing Los Angeles grimnesses."

Ham on Rye, published in 1982, also features Henry Chinaski as its protagonist. Bukowski travels into new territory with this novel, describing his/Chinaski's childhood and adolescent years. The first part of the book is dominated by Chinaski's brutal and domineering father, focusing more on Henry as he moves into his lonely and isolated adolescent years. Following high school, Chinaski holds a job and attends college for a short period of time before beginning his "real" life of cheap hotels, sleazy bars, and the track. It is also at this time that Henry starts to send stories to magazines and accumulate a number of rejection slips. "Particularly striking is Bukowski's uncharacteristic restraint: the prose is hard and exact, the writer's impulse towards egocentricity repressed," comments David Montrose in the Times Literary Supplement. Ben Reuven, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, describes the "first-person reminiscences" in Ham on Rye as being "taut, vivid, intense, sometimes poignant, [and] often hilarious," concluding that Bukowski's "prose has never been more vigorous or more powerful."

Continuing the examination of his younger years, Bukowski wrote the screenplay for the movie Barfly, which was released in 1987, starring Mickey Rourke. The movie focuses on three days in the life of Bukowski at the age of twenty-four. As the lead character, Henry Chinaski, Rourke spends most of these three days in a seedy bar, where he meets the first real love of his life, Wanda, played by Faye Dunaway. While this new romance is developing, a beautiful literary editor takes an interest in Chinaski's writings, and tries to seduce him with success. Chinaski must then choose between the two women. "At first Barfly seems merely a slice of particularly wretched life," observes David Ansen in Newsweek. "But under its seedy surface emerges a cunning comedy--and a touching love story." Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, sees the film as dealing "in the continuing revelation of character in a succession of horrifying, buoyant, crazy confrontations of barflies, bartenders, police and other representatives of the world of the sober." And Michael Wilmington concludes in the Los Angeles Times: "Whatever its flaws, [ Barfly] does something more films should do: It opens up territory, opens up a human being. The worst of it has the edge of coughed-up whimsy and barroom bragging. But the best has the shock of truth and the harsh sweet kiss of dreams."

Bukowski's experiences with the making of Barfly became the basis of his 1989 novel Hollywood. Chinaski is now an old man, married to Sarah, a shrewd woman apt to interrupt him during his many repetitious stories. The couple is off hard liquor, but are faithful drinkers of good red wine, and their life is a peaceful one until a filmmaker asks Chinaski to write a screenplay based upon his previous lifestyle; he agrees, figuring that this new venture will leave him enough time to spend at the track. Entering the world of show business, Chinaski finds himself mingling with famous stars, but must also deal with a number of other things, including a tax man (who advises him to spend his advance money before the government can get it). As the project progresses, its funding becomes shaky, the producer threatens to dismember parts of his body if the movie is not made, there are many rewrites, and Chinaski is hit with a terrible sadness. The movie is about what he used to be--a poetic barfly--and covers a time in his life when he feels he did his best writing. An old man now, Chinaski can watch his life being acted out at the movies, but he cannot jump back into it; he is now a successful man leading a respectable life. "The words often jar and Bukowski is better when he lets his dialogue do his griping for him. But this is still a superb snapshot of what filmmaking at the fag-end of the Hollywood dream is all about," relates Toby Moore in the Times Literary Supplement. Gary Dretzka, writing in the Chicago Tribune, asserts that "Bukowski offers an often insightful and continually outrageous view of how some movies get made." Dretzka goes on to advise: "Have some fun: Read this book, then go out and rent the Barfly video. Grab a beer and offer a toast to Charles Bukowski--survivor."

Like Dretzka, Kessler also believes in Bukowski's survival abilities, concluding that he "is a soulful poet whose art is an ongoing testimony to perseverance. It's not the drinking and f--ing and gambling and fighting and shitting that make his books valuable, but the meticulous attention to the most mundane experience, the crusty compassion for his fellow losers, the implicit conviction that by frankly telling the unglamorous facts of hopelessness some stamina and courage can be cultivated."

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)
• At the time of Bukowski's birth:
• Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States
• American Civil Liberties Union founded
• American artist Joseph Stella painted Brooklyn Bridge
• Mexican president Venustiano Carranza assassinated
• D. H. Lawrence published Women in Love
• At the time of Bukowski's death:
• Bill Clinton was president of the United States
• Ethnic violence erupted in Rwanda
• United States ended 19-year trade embargo with Vietnam
• Nelson Demille published Spencerville
• The times:
• 1930-1960: Modernist Period of American literature
• 1939-1945: World War II
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1960-: Postmodernist Period of American literature
• 1983: American invasion of Grenada
• 1991: Persian Gulf War
• Bukowski's contemporaries:
• Thelonious Monk (1920-1982) American jazz musician
• Ray Bradbury (1920-) American writer
• John Glenn (1921-) American astronaut
• Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) Indian writer
• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-) American writer
• Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) American Beat writer
• Norman Mailer (1923-) American writer
• Selected world events:
• 1920: Prohibition began in the United States
• 1922: James Joyce published Ulysses
• 1935: Louisiana governer Huey Long assassinated
• 1948: Vinyl phonograph record introduced to public
• 1955: Tennessee Williams published Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• 1969: Woodstock Music and Art Festival held in upstate New York
• 1974: Peter Shaffer published Equus
• 1989: National Museum of the American Indian established
• 1992: Tony Kushner published Angels in America

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.
• Drinking with Bukowski: Recollections of the Poet Laureate of Skid Row, Daniel West, ed., Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001.