Charles Bukowski

Writer CHARLES BUKOWSKI was a genius. There were no taboo subjects for him. He was a master of metaphor and the instant aphorism, vulgar, lyrical, and mercilessly gifted. One could not argue against his low-down, lumpen truth. He drank more than was necessary, had more mistresses than is considered decent, worked where it was not prestigious to work, and lived in a way not accepted in society. He never wrote about what is pleasant to read. His texts are bitter and truthful. A laborer, a drunkard, and one of the most intelligent writers of the second half of the 20th century. Childhood and youth Charles Bukowski (birth name Heinrich Karl Bukowski) was born on August 16, 1920, in Germany on the banks of the Rhine in Andernach. His mother, Katharina Fett, a local German woman, met his father, Henry Bukowski, an American serviceman of Polish origin, after the First World War. Bukowski’s parents were Catholics and raised their son within the church. He liked to claim that he was born out of wedlock, however, marriage registration records in Andernach show that his parents married a month before their son’s birth. After the collapse of the German economy following the First World War, the Bukowski family moved to the United States in 1923 and settled in Baltimore, Maryland. In order to seem more American, Bukowski’s parents began calling their son Henry and changed the pronunciation of their surname. He took the name Charles much later, after leaving his parents’ home. In 1930, thanks to money they had saved, the Bukowski family moved to a suburb of Los Angeles, where his father’s family lived. Throughout his childhood Charles Bukowski endured verbal and physical abuse from his almost constantly unemployed father (as described in detail in his autobiographical novel *Ham on Rye*). For “disciplinary” purposes, the elder Bukowski often and eagerly used the poker that lay gathering dust in the musty garage. The poet would recall the basement walls in which he was subjected to beatings in the landmark poem “Death Wants More Death” — “Death wants more death, and its webs are full...” In addition, Bukowski was the target of discrimination from local English-speaking children, who laughed at his strong German accent and