Short biography of charles bukowski

Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, on August 16, , the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from to , then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing igen. He worked a bred range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas hållplats attendant, lager boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, brev office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator.

Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His writing often featured a depraved storstads- environme

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Photograph by Ulf Andersen / Getty

In the third edition of “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,” in which poets appear in order of birth, the class of fields a strong team, including Howard Nemerov and Amy Clampitt. If you were to browse the poetry section of any large bookstore, you would probably find a book or two by each of those critically esteemed, prize-winning poets. Nowhere to be found in the canonizing Norton anthology, however, is the man who occupies the most shelf space of any American poet: Charles Bukowski. Bukowski’s books make up a burly phalanx, with their stark covers and long, lurid titles: “Love Is a Dog from Hell”; “Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.” They give the impression of an aloof, possibly belligerent empire in the middle of the republic of letters.

Bukowski himself, and his many, many readers, would not have it any other way. John Martin, the founder of Black Sparrow Press

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Charles Bukowski (Part One)

  The first great outsider to be featured on this blog is none other than Charles Bukowski, a man who's books absolutely took me by the throat when I first discovered them in my late teens and early twenties. I’ve got so many things to say about this man I decided to divide it all up in two parts, this being part one.

I discovered his books in my local library and it was a life changing experience.  Finally there was a writer who wrote about the tragedy of ordinary people wasting their lives as if it meant nothing at all. This was what I was looking for all that time. It wasn't just what he wrote about, it was the style of his writing as well. So fluent, so real, so pure, so dark and yet hilarious There was nothing pretentious about it. He was not trying to be clever, he was writing straight from the gut.
 

Bukowski wrote about the underbelly of society but never in a political way. Although he was very much anti-establishment, he was no