Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who used poetry and prose to describe ordinary life in lower-class American society. A cult figure, Bukowski drew on experience, emotion, and imagination in his work, using direct language and violent, sexually charged imagery.
“To write about love, you have to be either in love or heartbroken. And I don’t know which is worse.” This is precisely the dilemma that the great writer Charles Bukowski explored when he wrote about love. Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, in 1920. At the age of three, his family moved to the USA, Los Angeles, where Bukowski spent practically his entire life until the day of his death, in March 1994. Throughout the writer’s more than thirty-year career, Bukowski published 32 books of poetry, five books of short stories, four novels, as well as the script for the film “The Brewmaster.” If in Europe, novels, books of poetry and short stories gave him a sensational success, in America they ensured his fame as a cursed writer.
“Women” is his first book to be presented to the Albanian reader. Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who used poetry and prose to describe ordinary life in lower-class American society. A cult figure, Bukowski drew on experience, emotion, and imagination in his work, using direct language and violent, sexually charged imagery.
While some critics found his style offensive, others felt that Bukowski satirized macho behavior through the frequent use of sex, alcohol abuse, and violence. Born in Germany, Bukowski arrived in the United States when he was two years old. His father believed in discipline and often beat Bukowski for the smallest things, abuse that Bukowski detailed in his autobiographical teenage novel Bread and Sausage (brought to you in Albanian by Iris Sojli in a highly praised translation in 2015). In 1939, Bukowski enrolled at City College in Los Angeles.
Angeles, from which he was expelled at the beginning of World War II, when he moved to New York to become a writer. He spent the next five years writing and traveling, receiving many rejection letters from the newspapers to which he submitted his writings for publication. In 1946, Bukowski decided to give up his aspirations as a writer and embarked on a ten-year adventure that took him across America. After nearly dying in Los Angeles, Bukowski began writing again, although he continued to drink and cultivate a reputation as a hard-living poet.
He did not begin a career as a professional writer until after the age of thirty-five, and like his contemporaries, he began publishing in small newspapers, especially local papers like Open City and the LA Free Press. “Published by small and illegal newspapers or insignificant magazines,” wrote Jay Dougherty in Contemporary Novelists, “Bukowski gained popularity through word of mouth.” The main character in his poems and stories is generally autobiographical and is described as a slovenly writer [Henry Chinaski] who spends his days at menial jobs (where he is often laid off), drinking, and making love to a series of frivolous and debauched girls.
He associates with other losers, whores, pimps, and alcoholics. Bukowski wrote more than forty books of poetry, prose, and novels. Although Bukowski died of leukemia in 1994, his posthumous career proved to be as rich as his lifetime.
