Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) is an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is post-Beat, a perceptive and careful minimalist who comprehends and masters the range from quiet romanticism to soul-scarring cynicism, from farcical despair to sweet appreciations of cats and birds.
From day one of opening Whistlestop in 1985 I have sold Charles Bukowski, and I have guided many young people into the dark and treacherous waters of his poetry and fiction. He is not warm and fuzzy, not heroic, not your intellectual soulmate, often not even likable -- but, then, what business of yours is liking or not liking an artist? He had a stubborn core of humanity, a fear of other people that he hedged with a thorny persona, an honesty of language, and a careful capacity of friendship. He was a singular artist who survived his own vulnerabilities and the peculiar world he was born in.
In the store’s layout I have given Mr. Bukowski a shelf of his own in the North Room. It enabled me to consolidate his various forms of writing — poetry, fiction, and essays, along with biographical books.
Storm for the Living and the Dead: Uncollected and Unpublished Poems
Storm for the Living and the Dead: Uncollected and Unpublished Poems
A timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowski’s best unpublished and uncollected poems
Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who produced countless short stories, novels, and poems that have reached beyond their time and place to speak to generations of readers all over the world. Many of his poems remain little known, material that appeared in small magazines but was never collected, and a large number of them have yet to be published.
In Storm for the Living and the Dead, Abel Debritto has curated the very finest of this material—poems from obscure, hard-to-find magazines, as well as from libraries and private collections all over the country—most of which will be new to Bukowski’s readers and some of which has never been seen before. In doing so, Debritto has captured the essence of Bukowski’s inimitable poetic style—tough and hilarious but ringing with humanity. Storm for the Living and the Dead is a gift for any devotee of the Dirty Old Man of American letters.
Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.