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.
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
These mad immortal stories, now surfaced from the literary underground, have addicted legions of American readers, even though the high literary establishment continues to ignore them. In Europe, however (particularly in Germany, Italy, and France where he is published by the great publishing houses), he is critically recognized as one of America's greatest living realist writers.
Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920 and brought to America at the age of two. Eighteen or twenty books of prose and poetry, Bukowski, after publishing prose in Story and Portfolio, stopped writing for ten years. He arrived in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County General Hospital, hemorrhaging as a climax to a ten year drinking bout. Some say he didn't die. After leaving the hospital he got a typewriter and began writing again this time, poetry. He later returned to prose and gained some fame with his column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man. After 14 years in the Post Office he resigned at age 50, he says, to keep from going insane. He now claims to be unemployable and eats typewriter ribbons.