Charles Bukowski
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Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994), was a Los Angeles poet and novelist. Bukowski is sometimes known as a beat generation writer because of his informal style and non-conformist literary attitude, though he didn't identify himself this way. Bukowski closely associated his works with his home city of Los Angeles and wrote over fifty books before his death on March 9, 1994.
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Bukowski's Early Years
Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920 after his mother, a native German, met his father, an American serviceman, during the occupation of Germany at the end of World War I. Bukowski and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was two years old.
Raised during the Great Depression, Bukowski's father was often unemployed and, according to many of Bukowski's writings, verbally and physically abusive. This upbringing possibly contributed to Bukowski's lifelong feelings of isolation and his constant battles with alcoholism. For example, one of his later poems describes his enjoyment at having a medical checkup in which he found that his heavy drinking had had no perceptible effect on his health.
Bukowski's Adulthood
Bukowski spent most of his early adulthood working odd jobs and roaming across the United States. He also worked for eleven years for the United States Postal Service in Los Angeles. During this time, he periodically wrote and published.
However, it wasn't until 1969 that Bukowski, after publishing his works in various small literary magazines, decided to make writing his full time career. Bukowski 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." [1] (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jayd/buktro.htm) Shortly after he left the postal service he finished his first novel, appropriately titled Post Office.
Bukowski's Writings
Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the late 1950's and continuing on through the early '90s, with the poems and stories being republished by Black Sparrow Press (and now HarperCollins/ECCO) as collected volumes of his work. A prolific author, Bukowski eventually had over fifty books in print. [2] (http://smog.net/writers/bukowski/database/searchBOOKdate.php)
Bukowski acknowledged Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, John Fante, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and others as influences on his writing. Even though he is sometimes associated with the beat generation of writers because of his informal writing style, Bukowski didn't consider himself a beat writer (like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg).
Instead, Bukowski strongly associated with his home city of Los Angeles. In a 1974 interview he said, "You live in a town all your life, and you get to know every street corner. 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" [3] (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jayd/buktro.htm)
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." [4] (http://bostonreview.net/BR19.3/fiction.html)
Since his death in 1994, Bukowski has been the subject of a number of critical articles and books about both his life and writings. ECCO continues to release new collections of his poetry, culled from the thousands of works published in small literary magazines. A documentary movie about his life, Bukowski: Born Into This, was released in 2004.
Books by Charles Bukowski
- Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960)
- Longshot Pomes for Broke Players (1962)
- Run with the Hunted (1962)
- It Catches My Heart in Its Hand (1963)
- grip the walls (1964)
- Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965)
- Cold Dogs in the Courtyard (1965)
- Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts (1965)
- night's work (1966)
- The Genius of the Crowd (1966)
- All the Assholes in the World and Mine (1966)
- At Terror Street and Agony Way (1968)
- Poems Written Before Jumping out of an 8 Story Window (1968)
- Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
- A Bukowski Sampler (1969)
- if we take (1969)
- Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
- Another Academy (1970)
- Fire Station (1970)
- Post Office (1971) ISBN 0876850875
- Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972)
- Mockingbird, Wish Me Luck (1972)
- me and your sometimes love poems (1972)
- South of No North (1973)
- 55 beds in the same direction (1974)
- Burning in Water Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 (1974)
- Factotum (1975)
- The Last Poem & Tough Company (1976)
- Scarlet (1976)
- Art (1977)
- Love is a Dog from Hell (1977)
- You Kissed Lilly (1978)
- Women (1978)
- Legs, Hips and Behind (1978)
- A Love Poem (1979)
- Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1979)
- Shakespeare Never Did This (1979)
- Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981)
- The Last Generation (1982)
- Ham on Rye (autobiographical) (1982)
- Horsemeat (1982)
- Sparks (1983)
- Bring Me Your Love (illustrated by Robert Crumb) (1983) ISBN 0876856067
- Hot Water Music (1983)
- The Bukowski/Purdy Letters (1983)
- One For The Old Boy (1984)
- There's No Business (illustrated by Robert Crumb) (1984)
- War All the Time: Poems 1981-1984 (1984)
- Horses Don't Bet on People and Neither Do I (1984)
- Going Modern (1984)
- Alone In A Time Of Armies (1985)
- The Wedding (1986)
- Gold In Your Eye (1986)
- The Day it Snowed in L.A. (1986)
- You Get So Alone at Times It Just Makes Sense (1986)
- Relentless As The Tarantula (1986)
- Luck (1987)
- The Movie "Barfly" (1987)
- The Movie Critics (1988)
- Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966 (1988)
- Beauti-Ful (1988)
- Red (1989)
- If You Let Them Kill You They Will (1989)
- Hollywood (1989)
- We Ain't Got No Money Honey (1989)
- Septuagenarian Stew: Stories and Poems (1990)
- Not Quite Bernadette (1990)
- This (1990)
- Darkness & Ice (1990)
- In The Morning And At Night (1991)
- In The Shadow Of The Rose (1991)
- People Poems (1991)
- Now (1992)
- Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
- Three Poems (1992)
- Those Marvelous Lunches (1993)
- Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader (1993)
- Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993)
- Between The Earthquake (1993)
- Pulp (1994)
- Confession Of A Coward (1995)
- Shakespeare Never Did This (augmented edition) (1995)
- Heat Wave (1995)
- Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s, Volume 2 (1995)
- The Laughing Heart (1996)
- Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories (1996)
- A New War (1997)
- Bone Palace Ballet (1997)
- The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (1998)
- To Lean Back Into It (1998)
- The Singer (1999)
- Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978-1994, Volume 3 (1999)
- What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999)
- Popcorn In The Dark (2000)
- Open All Night (2000)
- Pink Silks (2001)
- Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli 1960-1967 (2001)
- the night torn mad with footsteps (2001)
- The Simple Truth (2002)
- Sifting Through The Madness for the Word, The Line, The Way: New Poems (2003) ISBN 00600568232
- The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems (2004) ISBN 0060577010
- Slouching Toward Nirvana (2005)
Books about Charles Bukowski
- Jory Sherman - Bukowski: Friendship, Fame & Bestial Myth - 1981
- Neeli Cherkowski - Bukowski - A Life - 1991
- Russell Harrison - Against The American Dream - 1994
- Amber O'Neil - Blowing My Hero http://www.etext.org/Zines/F5/Books.html - 1995
- A.D. Winans - The Charles Bukowski/Second Coming Years - 1996
- Gerald Locklin - Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet - 1996
- Steve Richmond - Spinning Off Bukowski - 1996
- Gay Brewer - Charles Bukowski - 1997
- John Thomas - Bukowski In The Bathtub - 1997
- Jim Christy - The Buk Book - 1997
- Ann Menebroker - Surviving Bukowski - 1998
- Carlos Polimeni - Bukowski For Beginners - 1998
- Howard Sounes - Charles Bukowski. Locked in the arms of a crazy life - 1998
- Gundolf S. Freyermuth - That's it. - 2000
- Aubrey Malone - the hunchback of east hollywood - 2003
- Ben Pleasants - Visceral Bukowski - 2004
In film
- Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) - Ben Gazzara plays Charles Serking, a character loosely based on Bukowski's autobiographical character Henry Chinaski. The slow and stiffly acted film never found an audience, and Bukowski - though friendly with Gazzara - panned the actor's performance.
- The film Barfly (1987) starring Mickey Rourke and written by Bukowski himself, was based on his life, the main character being his alter-ego, Henry Chinaski. His novel Hollywood was based on the tribulations of making this film.
- The same year Barfly debuted (1987), the Belgian film Crazy Love directed by Dominique Deruddere, was released. Based on the Bukowski story The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California, and portions of Ham on Rye, the film tells the story of a man's life by spotlighting three different nights spread over 20 years. Crazy Love was cited by Bukowski as his favorite film adaptation of his work.
- A documentary entitled Bukowski: Born Into This was released in American theaters on July 9, 2004, generally to good reviews. Actor Sean Penn as well as musicians Tom Waits and Bono, friends and fans of Bukowski, appear in the film.
- An adaptation of Bukowski's second novel, Factotum, was shot in Minnesota in 2004 and premiered 2005-04-12 at the Kosmorama film festival in Trondheim, Norway . It was directed by Bent Hamer, and Matt Dillon plays the role of Henry Chinaski (Bukowski's chosen name for his autobiographical character in a number of novels).
See also
External links
- The Beat Page on Charles Bukowski (http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/bukowski.html)
- Charles Bukowski’s My First Affair With That Older Woman (http://www.cosmoetica.com/TOP9-DES8.htm)
- An Introduction to Charles Bukowski (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jayd/buktro.htm)
- Extensive online database of Bukowski's work (http://smog.net/writers/bukowski/database/)
References
- An Introduction to Charles Bukowski [5] (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jayd/buktro.htm)
- The Hunchback of East Hollywood : A Biography of Charles Bukowski by Aubrey Malone (Critical Vision, 2003)
- Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes (Grove Press, 1999)
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