Poetry:
Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail, 1960
Poems and Drawings, 1962
Longshot Poems for Broke Players, 1962
Run with the Hunted, 1962
It Catches My Heart in Its Hand, 1963
Crucifix in a Deathhand, 1965
Cold Dogs in the Courtyard, 1965
The Genius of the Crowd, 1966
The Curtains Are Waving, 1967
At Terror Street and Agony Way, 1968
Poems Written Before Jumping out of an Eighth Story Window, 1968
A Bukowski Sampler, 1969
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills, 1969
Fire Station, 1970
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, 1972
Me and Your Sometimes Love Poems, 1973 (with Linda King)
While the Music Played, 1973
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, 1974
Africa, Paris, Greece, 1975
Scarlet, 1976
Maybe Tomorrow, 1977
Love Is a Dog from Hell, 1977
We’ll Take Them, 1978
Legs, Hips and Behind, 1978
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, 1979
Dangling in the Tournefortia, 1981
The Last Generation, 1982
War All the Time: Poems 1981-1984, 1984
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966, 1988
Last Night of the Earth Poems, 1992
Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems, 1997
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, 1999
Open All Night: New Poems, 2000
The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps, 2001
Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems, 2003
Long Fiction:
Post Office, 1971
Factotum, 1975
Women, 1978
Ham on Rye, 1982
You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense, 1986
Hollywood, 1989
Pulp, 1994
Short Fiction:
Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 1969
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, 1972
Life and Death in the Charity Ward, 1973
South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life, 1973
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, and Other Stories, 1983
Bring Me Your Love, 1983
Hot Water Music, 1983
There’s No Business, 1984
The Day It Snowed in L.A., 1986
Screenplay:
Barfly, 1987
Nonfiction:
Shakespeare Never Did This, 1979 (photographs by Michael Montfort)
The Bukowski/Purdy Letters: A Decade of Dialogue, 1964-1974, 1983
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters, 1960-1970, 1993
Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters, 1978-1994, 1999
Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli, 1960-1967, 2001
Miscellaneous:
You Kissed Lilly, 1978
Septuagenarian Stew: Stories and Poems, 1990
Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader, 1993
Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories, 1996
Transforming ordinary events into monuments of alienation and despair, Charles Bukowski (byew-KOW-skee) transformed his private agony into a poetry with universal implications. At the age of two, Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr., emigrated from Germany with his parents, who settled in Los Angeles. A victim of child abuse, Bukowski started drinking at an early age to escape the pain of his father’s violent discipline and unrealistic expectations. Images of alcoholism pervade Bukowski’s texts and function as a backdrop for all his other subjects. The topic of many of his poems and stories, as well as the novel Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s difficult childhood created in him a disdain for the bourgeois idealism touted by Henry, Sr., and fomented a fear of intimacy that would continue for much of his life. Bukowski matriculated at Los Angeles City College in 1939 but left in 1941, partly because of his resistance to the overzealous anti-German propagandizing of his instructors and classmates. Throughout his career, Bukowski challenged the automaton-like acceptance of conventional “wisdom” and explored the nuances of a seamier, grittier existence.
Charles Bukowski
Bukowski began publishing stories and poetry in the mid-1940’s, but the realities of alcoholism and economics combined to quell his creative urge until the mid-1950’s, when a bleeding ulcer forced him to reassess the direction of his life and begin writing the poetry that inspired publisher John Martin to support him with a stipend. In the interim, Bukowski drank and lived at the subsistence level by performing the menial labor he describes and critiques in his novel Factotum. An autodidactic confessional poet, Bukowski, like Sylvia Plath and Delmore Schwartz, transforms autobiographical data into miniature tragedies. Written in a sinewy free verse, Bukowski’s early poetry employs deceptively simple narrative situations–such as the desire for an afternoon beer, a horse race, or a trip to the mailbox–that resonate with pregnant emotion. Bukowski’s personae in the early, neo-naturalist poems often experience epiphanies in which they glean a profound sense of alienation from their daily tasks and activities. Their powerlessness to alter their situations, coupled with the knowledge that their emotional dislocation will continue to grow, often leaves Bukowski’s narrators in a state of anguish, even to the point of considering suicide. The later poetry continues to tap the reservoir of Bukowski’s life, but his personae–including “Henry Chinaski”–often face seemingly intolerable situations with a type of grudging resignation and humor rather than with despondency. The candor and dark beauty of Bukowski’s poetry, as well as its highly accessible subject matter, made it popular with the so-called underground. It also earned him a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant in 1974.
Bukowski’s prose brought him even more fame, but it also–unfairly–earned him the reputation of being a one-dimensional sexist and solipsist. Written in the economical, gritty fashion of writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Fante, and Dashiell Hammett, Bukowski’s stories and novels explore the bittersweet reality of everyday life. His personae must negotiate through a regime of mind-numbing jobs, deteriorating personal relationships, alcoholism, gambling, and futility without losing their sanity or humor. While Bukowski did draw from his own experiences in novels such as Post Office, which distills eleven years of his experience as a postal worker, and Women, which describes several of his intimate relationships as well as his life as a sought-after poet, he, like Henry Miller, rose above simple solipsism by imbuing his texts with the sense that even though society may circumscribe the individual, a truly liberated person may avoid being crushed.
Bukowski’s stories, often only a few pages long, frequently employ the epiphanic techniques evident in the poetry. Although most of his narratives deal with average people or with himself, Bukowski occasionally displayed his range by writing on more esoteric subjects, such as a baseball player’s contract negotiations or the motion-picture industry, the background of Hollywood. Although his fiction sometimes treats women harshly, Bukowski often presents his personae as emotionally vulnerable and physically impotent, suggesting that his prose ironically deconstructs, rather than valorizes, sexual power relationships. Bukowski’s dark humor, along with his consistently proletarian ethos, makes his fiction unique in American letters. Bukowski died of leukemia in 1994, shortly after publishing his novel Pulp. Several posthumous poetry collections have been published.