Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer whose work grew out of the streets, rooms, jobs, bars, and hard edges of Los Angeles. He was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski on August 16, 1920, in Andernach, Prussia, Weimar Germany, and died on March 9, 1994. After his family moved to the United States in 1923 and later to Mid-City, Los Angeles, in 1930, the city became the setting and pressure behind much of his writing. His subjects were plain and rough: the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work.

Bukowski came of age in a household marked by strain. His father was often unemployed, and in the autobiographical Ham on Rye, Bukowski says his father was frequently abusive, physically and mentally. He later said the beatings helped his writing because they taught him about undeserved pain. As a child, he spoke English with a strong German accent and was mocked by other children. He was shy and socially withdrawn, and an extreme case of acne in his teen years made that isolation worse. The Great Depression fed his anger as he grew, and gave him much of the voice and material that would later appear in his poems and stories.

After graduating from Los Angeles High School in 1939, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College for two years, studying art, journalism, and literature, then left at the start of World War II. He moved to New York City hoping to become a writer while living as a financially pinched blue-collar worker. In 1944, while living in Philadelphia, he was arrested by FBI agents on suspicion of draft evasion. His German birth drew attention at a time when the United States was at war with Nazi Germany. He was held for seventeen days, then failed a psychological examination for military service and was classified as unfit.

His first published short story, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,” appeared in Story magazine in 1944, when he was 23. Two years later, “20 Tanks from Kasseldown” appeared in Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly. Bukowski later became closely tied to small literary magazines and small presses, publishing from the early 1940s into the early 1990s. Over his career he wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually publishing more than sixty books. Among them were Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window and Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame.

Bukowski was also known for his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the underground newspaper Open City, which led the FBI to keep a file on him. His work was collected and republished by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press, and he remained loyal to the small press editors who first supported him. During his life he received little attention from academic critics in the United States, but he was better received in Western Europe, especially in the United Kingdom and Germany. Time called him a “laureate of American lowlife,” while Adam Kirsch wrote that his appeal came from mixing confessional intimacy with the bold manner of a pulp-fiction hero.

Bukowski’s words still resonate because they refuse polish when grit is the point. He wrote about humiliation, work, hunger, loneliness, drink, desire, and survival without making them prettier than they were. That bluntness can sound harsh, but it also makes room for defiance. One line often shared from him captures that spirit: “We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” In Bukowski, the odds are real, but so is the laugh.