Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer whose gritty, comic writing often depicted marginalized people and working-class Los Angeles.

Dirty realism: A literary style marked by spare prose, ordinary settings, and unsentimental attention to everyday life. Bukowski’s plainspoken stories of poverty and routine helped make this style recognizable.
Post Office: A 1971 novel by Charles Bukowski about Henry Chinaski’s years as a postal worker. This novel turns the drudgery of Bukowski’s own postal employment into dark comedy.
John Martin (publisher): An American publisher who founded Black Sparrow Press and published Charles Bukowski’s work. Martin’s commitment gave Bukowski a durable book publisher and helped build his readership.
Andernach: A town in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, where Charles Bukowski was born in 1920. Bukowski’s birth in Germany preceded his family’s move to the United States.
Beat Generation: A postwar literary movement associated with experimental writing and rejection of conventional social values. Bukowski shared its outsider outlook but generally favored direct prose over Beat experimentation.
Los Angeles: A major city in Southern California and the setting for much of Bukowski’s writing. Its streets, bars, workplaces, and neighborhoods supply the geography of his fiction.
Factotum: A 1975 novel by Charles Bukowski following Henry Chinaski through a string of menial jobs. Its job-hopping episodes capture the precarious labor central to Bukowski’s fiction.
Black Sparrow Press: An independent American publisher founded by John Martin in 1966. Its editions made Bukowski’s poetry and prose central to the press’s identity.
Los Angeles High School: A public high school in Los Angeles attended by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski’s youth in Los Angeles furnished settings and memories later reworked as fiction.
Confessional poetry: A mode of poetry that uses intimate personal experience, often including trauma and family life. Bukowski’s first-person poems can seem confessional, though they often emphasize performance and comic persona.

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Mickey RourkeRelated: Bukowski wrote Barfly, giving Rourke a role modeled on the author's alter ego.