Free Press.īy 1960, Bukowski returned to the post office in Los Angeles and began working as a letter-filing clerk, a position he held for more than a decade. He started his career as a professional author at the age of 35, before which he mainly wrote for “underground” newspapers like Open City and the L.A. When he nearly died in an incident in Los Angeles in 1955, he returned to writing, although he also continued to drink heavily, becoming known to others as a hard-living poet. He spent this part of his life touring the US, often working in various short-term jobs and staying in cheap hostels.īukowski also struggled with hunger and spent time with women at a more intense pace than in other parts of his life, and later described these years in his “Chinaski” book Factotum. Two years later, another short story, 20 Tanks from Kasseldown, was published.ĭisillusioned with scattershot literary career, Bukowski then stopped writing for almost 10 years. (Bukowski dodged the wartime draft until 1944 until his arrest, when a psychological evaluation found him unfit for service.)Īt age 24, his short piece Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip was published in Story magazine. He then decided to travel as much as he could, and continued to do so until 1946. He spent the following years writing, travelling, and collecting rejection slips from the magazines he submitted his stories to. In the face of this, “Chinaski” left his home and college, and moved to New York City to become a writer. "This is going to help me for a very long time," he wrote, describing alcohol as “magic” and drinking as a method he could use to come to more amicable terms with his own life.įeeling indifference and contempt to the expectations of both his father and society, he began to turn into a “listless underachiever” as a way of rising up against all the norms he had been forced to internalize.ĭuring his school years, he read as much as he could, and wrote short stories, which drove his father crazy when he read some of them, and led him to destroy his son’s writings. The novel also tells how Chinaski/Bukowski first encountered alcohol in his teen years – the start of a lifelong habit for the self-described “barfly.” In this work, he said his father regularly beat him with a razor strop until his teen years, adding that this made him understand what “undeserved pain” was and gave him the skills to write about it. His father, who lost his job during the Great Depression like millions of other Americans, was a man who believed in firm discipline, and frequently beat his son at the slightest pretext.īukowski detailed this abuse in his semi-autobiographical Ham on Rye (1982), one of a series of novels telling the life story of “Henry Chinaski,” Bukowski’s scarcely disguised alter ego. He was brought to the US West Coast, the city Los Angeles, California when he was just 2.Īs a young, shy, and socially withdrawn boy, Bukowski was bullied by other boys and often rejected by girls due to his skin (he was plagued by acne), German accent, and the clothes he wore. 16, 1920 in Andernach, Germany, Heinrich Karl (Henry Charles) Bukowski was the son of a US soldier and a German woman. One hundred and one years since the birth of 20th-century American author Charles Bukowski, he is still seen as a cult hero who used his literary skills to depict depression, the depravity of urban life, and the downtrodden in American society.īorn on Aug.
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