Charles Bukowski earned acclaim as a poet, prose author, screenwriter, and performer of spoken-word pieces by mining the raw underbelly of existence, particularly its excesses in alcohol, erotic encounters, and physical confrontations. At the same time he built a public image defined by precisely those habits—excessive drinking, sexual license, and street fights—which propelled him toward worldwide renown and honors.
He entered the world in Andernach, Germany, during 1920, arriving in the United States three years later and growing up in Los Angeles, the city that remained his home for the next five decades. At twenty-four he saw his initial short story appear in print; for years afterward he inhabited dilapidated boarding houses, taking whatever employment he could find, including a long stint with the United States Postal Service. Over his lifetime he released close to fifty volumes of fiction and verse, most of them chronicling his years on Skid Row. That larger-than-life figure reached the cinema when Mickey Rourke embodied him in the screenplay Bukowski himself wrote, Barfly. On 9 March 1994, shortly after finishing his final novel, he succumbed to pneumonia in San Pedro, California, at the age of seventy-three.
Although Bukowski claimed to despise reading his work before audiences, a handful of those performances and private tapes have since become available. The broadest release remains the 1994 album Hostage, issued by Rhino’s Word Beat label. A set of domestic recordings titled King of Poets followed in 1997, and two further documents appeared in 2000: another at-home session called 70 Minutes in Hell and a restored edition of Poems & Insults, drawn from his widely discussed 1975 appearance in San Francisco.
