Charles Bukowski
Born: August 16, 1920 – Andernach, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
Charles Bukowski was a German-born American poet, novelist, and short-story writer whose work focused on urban poverty, alienation, sex, and alcoholism. Best known for Post Office, Women, and Ham on Rye, he became one of the late twentieth century’s most widely read underground literary voices, with work translated internationally.
Biography & Author's Journey
Charles Bukowski was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski on August 16, 1920, in Andernach, Germany, and moved with his family to Los Angeles as a small child. The city, with its boarding houses, factories, bars, racetracks, and hard edges, became the defining landscape of his work. His early life was marked by poverty, social isolation, severe acne, and a difficult relationship with his father, experiences that later shaped the bruised realism of his poetry and fiction. He attended Los Angeles City College briefly but left without a degree, drifting through a long series of jobs that included warehouse work, trucking, mail handling, and other forms of precarious labor. Those years of instability gave him not only subject matter but also a fixed point of view: sympathy for people on the margins and distrust of polished respectability.
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Community Voices
"Charles Bukowski was a prolific underground writer"
— Poetry Foundation
"Charles Bukowski became world famous for his bawdy tales of lust, liquor, and love"
— TIME
"Charles Bukowski, a California cult poet"
— The Washington Post
"Charles Bukowski was an American author noted for violent images and graphic language"
— Britannica
"Charles Bukowski was called the poet laureate of L.A. lowlife"
— Los Angeles Times
"Charles Bukowski, the Los Angeles-based laureate of American lowlife"
— TIME
"Charles Bukowski almost singlehandedly inspired a generation of would-be writers"
— The Guardian