WRITER

Charles Bukowski

1920 - 1994

Charles Bukowski

Henry Charles Bukowski ( boo-KOW-skee; born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, German: [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈkaʁl buˈkɔfski]; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Charles Bukowski has received more than 8,735,918 page views. His biography is available in 74 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 70 in 2019). Charles Bukowski is the 120th most popular writer (down from 102nd in 2019), the 81st most popular biography from Germany (up from 82nd in 2019) and the 9th most popular German Writer.

Charles Bukowski is most famous for his autobiographical novels and poetry about the life of a low-income, working-class man.

Memorability Metrics

8.7M
Page Views (PV)
76.10
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
74
Languages Editions (L)
9.68
Effective Languages (L*)
3.66
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Post office

Fiction, Postal service, Employees

1971

Ham on Rye

Fiction, Teenage boys, Alcoholics

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

1982

Factotum

Fiction, Beat generation, Occupations

One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.

1975

The days run away like wild horses over the hills

Nonfiction

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).

1969

Women

Fiction, Man-woman relationships, Man-woman relationships in fiction

1978

Hollywood

Fiction, Motion picture industry, Literature

1989