CHARLES BUKOWSKI

"Charles Bukowski (Hank to his friends) rarely wrote about anywhere else but the city in which he spent much of his life: Los Angeles. His beat was the seedy underside, the racetracks and strip joints, the panhandlers and hustlers, the drunks and hookers rather than the glamour of Hollywood; the inspiration for his writing was a series of dead-end jobs in warehouses and offices and factories. It was in the evenings that he would put on a classical record, open a beer and begin to type. Brought up by a violent father, Bukowski suffered childhood beatings before developing horrific acne and withdrawing into a moody adolescence. Much of his young life epitomised the style of the Beat generation - riding Greyhound buses, bumming around and drinking himself into a stupor; he was also a prolific writer. His first story was published when he was 24; his first poetry when he was 35. His novels (including his autobiographical novel of his childhood Ham on Rye) sold millions of copies worldwide, in dozens of languages. He published 32 books of poetry, 5 books of short stories, 4 novels and the screenplay Barfly, and his letters and posthumously published poems continue to appear today. Barry Miles turns his attention to the exploits of this hard-drinking, belligerent, wild man of literature to reveal the inspiration behind his immortalisation of the American underclass. The essential addition for every Bukowski fan's collection."--BOOK JACKET.