Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and German mother. At three years, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He studied at Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His failure to publish success at this time caused him to stop writing in 1946 and resulted in a decade-long delay. After receiving a bleeding wound, he decided to write again. He has worked in a variety of roles to support her writing, including a dishwasher, truck driver and uploader, mail carrier, security guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, housekeeper, shipping clerk, office clerk, parking attendant, Red Cross orderly, and metal detector. He has also worked in the dog biscuit factory, slaughterhouse, cake and cookie factory, and hung posters on the streets of New York City. Bukowski published his first essay when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His writing often reflected the state of the perverted universe of the city, affected members of American society, straightforward language, violence and pornography, and some of his work centers around the character of Henry Chinaski. His first book of poems was published in 1959; has also published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), School from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems ( 1992). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.