Ham on Rye is Bukowski's most profound novel. Like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, it is written from the perspective of an impressionable child dealing with the duplicity, pretension, and vanity of the adult world. A child gradually discovering alcohol and women, gambling and fistfights, D.H. Lawrence and Hemingway, Turgenev and Dostoevsky.

When you're really bad, you don't pretend, you just are. And I liked being a bastard. Trying to be good made me weak.

When someone else's problems coincide with yours and it seems like they're just sharing them with you, that's great.

— You just rebel against everything. How are you going to live your life?

— I don't know. I'm already tired.

One day I will be happy, like any of you, mark my words.