Charles Bukowski
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Woman: “Will I disturb your writing if I vacuum?” Bukowski: “Nothing can disturb my writing, it’s a disease.” --via The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (2005) "I've never been lonely. I've been in a room -- I've felt suicidal. I've been depressed. I've felt awful -- awful beyond all -- but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. It's being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. You know the typical crowd, "Wow, it's Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there?" Well, yeah. Because there's nothing out there. It's stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I've never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories. That's all. Sorry for all the millions, but I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have."-- Bukowski cited in a seven page collection of Bukowski quotes published by Sean Penn after interviewing Charles Bukowski, titled "Tough Guys Write Poetry", which appeared in the September 1987 edition of Interview magazine |
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Henry Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was an influential Los Angeles poet and novelist. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles. He is often mentioned as an influence by contemporary authors, and his style is frequently imitated. A prolific author, Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short-stories, and six novels, eventually having more than fifty books in print.
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Work
Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s, with the poems and stories being later republished by Black Sparrow Press (now HarperCollins/ECCO) as collected volumes of his work.
Bukowski acknowledged Anton Chekhov, James Thurber, Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, John Fante, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Robinson Jeffers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, Antonin Artaud, E.E. Cummings and others as influences, and often spoke of Los Angeles as his favorite subject. In a 1974 interview he said, "You live in a town all your life, and you get to know every bitch on the street corner and half of them you have already messed around with. You've got the layout of the whole land. You have a picture of where you are. ... Since I was raised in L.A., I've always had the geographical and spiritual feeling of being here. I've had time to learn this city. I can't see any other place than L.A."
One critic has described Bukowski's fiction as a "detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free", an image he tried to live up to with sometimes riotous public poetry readings and boorish party behaviour. Since his death in 1994, Bukowski has been the subject of a number of critical articles and books about both his life and writings. His work has received relatively little attention from academic critics. ECCO continues to release new collections of his poetry, culled from the thousands of works published in small literary magazines. According to ECCO, the 2007 release The People Look Like Flowers At Last will be his final posthumous release as now all his once-unpublished work has been published. Bukowski: Born Into This, a film documenting the author's life, was released in 2004.
In June 2006, Bukowski's literary archive was donated by his widow to the Huntington Library, in San Marino, CA. Copies of all editions of his work published by the Black Sparrow Press are held at Western Michigan University, which purchased the archive of the publishing house after its closure in 2003.
Works
Novels
- Post Office (1971)
- Factotum (1975)
- Women (1978)
- Ham On Rye (1982)
- Hollywood (1989)
- Pulp (1994)
Poetry
- Longshot Poems for Broke Players (1962)
- It Catches My Heart in its Hands (1963)
- Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965)
- Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window (1968)
- The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
- Burning in Water, Drowning in Flames (1974)
- Love is a Dog from Hell (1977)
- War All the Time (1984)
- The Roominghouse Madrigals (1988)
- The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
- Betting on the Muse (1996)
- Play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit
- Bone Palace Ballet (1998)
- Open All Night (2000)
- The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps (2001)
- Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: Book 1 (2003)
- Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: Book 2 (2003)
- Bukowski: New Poems Book 3 (2004)
- The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain (2004)
- Slouching Toward Nirvana (2006)
- Come On In! (2007)
- People Look Like Flowers At Last (2007)
- The Pleasures of the Damned (2007)
Short story collections
- Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wall (1960)
- Run With the Hunted (1962)
- Cold Dogs in the Courtyard (1965)
- Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts (1965)
- Genius of the Crowd (1966)
- At Terror Street and Agony Way (1968)
- A Bukowski Sampler (1969)
- Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972)
- Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972)
- South of No North (1973)
- Play the Piano Drunk (1979)
- Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1980)
- Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981)
- Tales of Ordinary Madness (1983)
- Hot Water Music (1983)
- The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983)
- All's Normal Here (1985)
- You Get So Alone at Times that It Just Makes Sense (1986)
- Septuagenarian Stew (1990)
- What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999)
Nonfiction
- Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
- Shakespeare Never Did This (1980)
- The Bukowski/Purdy Letters (1983)
- Screams from the Balcony (1993)
- Living on Luck (1995)
- The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (1998)
- Reach for the Sun (1999)
- Beerspit Night and Cursing (2001)
Major Biographies
- Hugh Fox - Charles Bukowski A Critical and Bibliographical Study - 1969
- Neeli Cherkovski - Bukowski - A Life - 1991
- Russell Harrison - Against The American Dream - 1994
- Gay Brewer - Charles Bukowski, Twayne's United States Authors Series - 1997
- Howard Sounes - Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life - 1998
- Ben Pleasants - Visceral Bukowski - 2004
See also
