Charles Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920 to a US soldier and a German woman. The three came to Los Angeles in 1922 where Bukowski would grow up and spend the rest of his life. "The City of Angels" had a huge influence on his writing and his lifestyle. Bukowski grew up during the Great Depression, a time of financial desparity and great poverty in America. His father was a violent man and Bukowski turned both to alcohol and "listless rebellion" as a means of coping. After high school he flirted with a roaming, homeless lifestyle, returning home to his parents only when he had nowhere else to go and no money to do so.
Bukowski first published a short story in
Story Magazine in 1944. He gained moderate success but no matter how many books or poems he published he was not politically correct, nor emotionally stable, and he was never America's darling.
Bukowski enjoyed a dirty, drunken, life in the bad neighborhoods of Los Angeles and faithfully chronicled that lifestyle in his poems.
Bukowski died in 1994 of Leukemia.
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