Bukowski, Charles (original) (raw)

Extract

Charles Bukowski fought, drank, and tirelessly wrote his way to international renown by defining a new American outsider poetry. A self-mythologizing and ingenious promoter, Bukowski was also an extremely prolific novelist, columnist, short-story writer, and poet best known for his hard-bitten, minimalist portrayals of Los Angeles's underbelly. Bukowski provokes extreme reactions to his work. On the one hand he is a cult hero, a writer who sees through the pretensions of life and literature to depict the world in all its brutality and beauty. On the other hand he is dismissed as a primitive writer who spewed out a facile mixture of juvenile bile, self-absorbed rant, and clever posturing designed to get a rise from his audience and raise sales of his books. Bukowski published over sixty volumes of poetry and prose, and his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Though he lived hard and drank determinedly for most of his life, he died on 9 March 1994 from leukemia. At the time of his death, he had become wealthy from his many writings and lived in the comfortable suburb of San Pedro.