Birthday: "Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."

Here's how The Writer's Almanac remembered him today:

It's the birthday of the man Time magazine called "the laureate of American lowlife": Charles Bukowski, born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Germany (1920). His father was an American soldier, and his mother was German. They moved back to the States when the boy was two years old, and he grew up in Los Angeles, a scrawny kid who was frequently bullied. He had his first drink at 13: "It was magic," he later wrote. "Why hadn't someone told me?"

He published his first short story when he was 24, but got discouraged by all the rejection slips that followed, and didn't write again until he was 35. He published his first book of poetry, called Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail, in 1959. He once said that his work was 93 percent autobiographical; it featured his alter ego, Henry Chinaski, a writer who works at a variety of unskilled jobs, drinks heavily, and takes up with loose women.

Bukowski said, "Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well."

Bukowski died in 1994. Here are some things he said:

"Barbet Schroeder [who directed a loose biopic of Bukowski, called Barfly] wants a plot and an evolvement of character. Sh-t, my characters seldom evolve, they are too f-cked up. They can't even type."

"Critics: They smell life and they cannot stand it."

"DH Lawrence was solid all the way through but Henry Miller was more modern, less artsy, until he got into his Star-Trek babbling . . . with William Faulkner, the public has swallowed him with one big gulp - but a lot of Faulkner's pure sh-t, but it's clever sh-t, cleverly dressed."




Related sites:

Charles Bukowski, American author

151 poems