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Charles Bukowski
A cult figure, novelist, short-story writer, poet and journalist.
One of the greatest writers to come out of Los Angeles, many consider
Bukowski to be a true voice of the city of angels. Bukowski,
also known as "Buk," wrote with raw emotion and painted
with words. His canvas was Los Angeles. Not the glitter though. His Los
Angeles was the stench of alley-ways, broken dreams, broken hearts, winos
and of course...the horse track.
Bukowski
was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920 and brought to the United States
at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for
fifty years. Buk published his first story when he was
24, "The Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip," but spent the next 10
years of his life drifting from city to city, deluging his body with pills
and booze. As he said, "I packed it in. I threw away all the
stories and concentrated upon drinking. I didn't feel that the publishers
were ready and that although I was ready, I could be readier..."
This would land him in the charity ward of the Los Angeles City
Hospital suffering from severe internal hemorraging. After his near brush
with death, he started writing again, using sleazy bars, dirty beds and
indulgence in women and alcoholism as landscapes for free verse stories
and poems. He published more than 45 books of poetry and prose
in his life-time.
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