Charles Bukowski was a drunk. A literate and amazingly brilliant drunk. Bukowski faced countless hardships in life that affected how he lived and acted towards the world. He had a tenacious childhood, which shaped him into the man he became. Bukowski had an subject world of drinking, sex, gambling, and music in his literate world (Poetryfoundation.org). One of the finest quotes of his work is “Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.”. This quote is from his book What Matter Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire. Bukowski composed over forty volumes of poetry, six novels, and several short-story collections along with his screenplay of the film Barfly (Columbia …show more content…
Barfly, won the San Francisco Film Festivals silver Keel Award after being voted the best cultural film on public TV (IMDb). His most honored work is his two novels Ham on Rye and Post Office (ColumbiaElectronicEncyclopedia). Bukowski's poetry, like all his writing, essentially autobiographical and rooted in clinical detail rather than metaphor. Similar to his poetry in subject matter, Bukowski's short stories also deal with sex, violence, and the absurdities of life (IMDb). During the 1960s, he became an outsider hero, lauded by Sartre, Genet, and other literary celebrities (May). Although Bukowski is as close to anyone has ever gotten close to being a poet laureate of Los Angeles, his appeal has always been limited to the literary fringe and the social outcast …show more content…
He may not be praised by all, but the ones who do, know just how strong his writing is. Beaten as a kid and unloved throughout his childhood damaged him. He drank at a very early age and continued to his whole life. He also married several times, including to Barbara Frye, a wealthy poetry publisher, and to Linda Lee Beighle, a former health food restaurant owner (Belanger). He and his first wife, Frances Smith, did have a daughter in 1958. He worked many little jobs that paid meager money. Most notable among his many careers was that of postal carrier and clerk, which he chronicled in the novel Post Office (Belanger). He worked for the U.S. Postal Service for twelve years, between the 1950s and 1970, finally ending his career after Black Sparrow Press, publisher John Martin agreed to pay him a hundred dollars a month for life to write. Belanger expressed that Bukowski enjoyed considerable fame and happiness during the later years of his career. Poetry reading tours, which he chose to do less and less later in his life, introduced him to younger audiences, and the considerable sales of his many volumes of poetry and fiction allowed him to live the life he had imagined as a young man. Charles Bukowski's experience as a underdog made him such a tremendous writer because he used his pain to identify with other underdogs and motivate his writing. By the time he died of leukemia in 1994, at the age of seventy-three, he had achieved