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Micro-Bio: Charles Bukowski
“People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”
That’s Charles Bukowski. The Bard of Booze. Legendary drunk, cult favorite, darling of the L.A. literary underground.
His true life stories fueled Barfly (1987), which features Mickey Rourke playing Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s main literary protagonist and real-life mirror. The film enjoys a 7.1 rating on IMDB and gave Bukowski financial security for the first time in his life, at age 67, after a lifetime of writing (and writing and writing and drinking and drinking).
Bukowski was a writer. He worked menial jobs to survive, but wrote to live. He eventually gave up the jobs, saying he could keep doing them and go crazy, or he could “play at writer and starve.” He declared that he had “decided to starve.”
A sympathetic publisher, Black Sparrow Press, gave him a small monthly stipend so he wouldn’t starve and he started cranking out novels that, eventually, attracted a cult following. His first came out in 1971: Post Office (where he worked for years). They say it’s essential reading, along with his Factotum and Women.
He was, critics say, a misogynist. But oh well. I’m giving him a try.
