![]() He bought a BMW 320i and an $80,000 house in San Pedro. By 1984 he was earning more than $100,000 a year. Success changed Bukowski’s lifestyle dramatically. With the release of the film Barfly in 1987, he became famous at home. In 1978, Bukowski read to packed auditoriums in Germany and was lionized by the European media. It was followed by three autobiographical novels in the same vein: Factotum (1975), Women (1978), and Ham On Rye (1982). A critical and financial success, it sold 75,000 copies in the United States and more than half a million copies abroad. In February 1971 Black Sparrow published Post Office, Bukowski’s novel based on eleven grueling years with the postal service. The 1970s and 1980s were Bukowski’s most productive years. About to be fired anyway, Bukowski gratefully accepted the offer. After publishing several books by Bukowski, Martin agreed to give him a stipend of $100 a month if he would leave the post office and devote himself to writing full-time. It was John Martin, however, the founder of Black Sparrow Press, who was to change Bukowski’s life forever. In 1963 the Loujon Press edition of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands received high praise from Kenneth Rexroth in the New York Times Book (Review. His first collection of poems, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, appeared in 1960. Postal Service gave him financial security. A $15,000 inheritance and a steady, if stultifying, job sorting mail with the U.S. ![]() With the exception of Jane’s death, the 1960s were good to Bukowski. Baker’s death on 22 January 1962 inspired his moving poem “For Jane, with all the love I had, which was not enough.” Bukowski found an apartment at 1623 North Mariposa Avenue and began seeing Jane Baker off and on again. Temperamentally unsuited for each other, they divorced on 18 March 1958 and had no children. Following a brief visit with Frye’s relatives in Wheeler, Texas, they returned to Los Angeles, where they published a special issue of Harlequin containing eight Bukowski poems. They married in Las Vegas, Nevada, on 29 October 1955. After breaking up with Baker, he met Barbara Frye, the editor of Harlequin, who had accepted some of his poems. Upon his release from the hospital, Bukowski began writing poetry. Their constant drinking and carousing proved too much for Bukowski, who in the spring of 1955 awoke one morning in the charity ward of Los Angeles County Hospital, having narrowly escaped death from a bleeding ulcer. The tempestuous love affair that followed was dramatized in the Barbet Schroeder film Barfly (1987), with Faye Dunaway playing Wanda Wilcox (Baker’s role) and Mickey Rourke starring as Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s literary doppelganger. For the next ten years he devoted himself to boozing and barroom brawling.īack in Los Angeles in 1946, Bukowski met Jane Cooney Baker in the Glenview Bar. A steady stream of rejection slips discouraged Bukowski, however, causing him to abandon the pen in favor of the bottle. “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip” appeared in the March-April issue of Story in 1944, and “20 Tanks from Kasseldown” was published in Caresse Crosby’s Portfolio III (1946), alongside work by Henry Miller, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Writing under his middle name, Charles, Bukowski had some early success. Exempted from military service for psychological reasons, he spent the war years writing and traveling, supporting himself at a variety of menial jobs including stock boy, dishwasher, elevator operator, and Red Cross orderly. In 1939 Bukowski enrolled in Los Angeles City College, but he took little interest in his studies and in 1941 dropped out to pursue a writing career. Along with playing the horses and classical music, they were to remain lifelong comforts. As a teenager Bukowski discovered two remedies for his pain: alcohol and literature. Living under constant stress, he developed one of the worst cases of acne vulgaris his doctors had ever seen. In 1936 Bukowski entered Los Angeles High School, where he continued to feel unpopular and out of place. His father beat him regularly with a razor strop and he was teased and bullied by his classmates at the Virginia Road Elementary School and later at Mount Vernon Junior High. The family left for the United States in April 1923, living briefly in Baltimore, Maryland and Pasadena, California, before settling permanently in Los Angeles, where Bukowski, Sr., found work as a milkman.īukowski’s childhood was a living nightmare. 9 March 1994 in San Pedro, California), hard-drinking novelist, poet, and short-story writer best known for his autobiographical screenplay Barfly (1987).Ĭhristened Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr., in the Roman Catholic faith, Bukowski was the only child of Henry Charles Bukowski, an American sergeant stationed in occupied Germany, and his wife, Katherine Fett, a German seamstress.
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