Living on Luck Selected Letters Volume 2

This collection is based around Bukowski finishing work at the post office in the late 1960s and finishing the script for “Barfly” in 1980, by which time he was an international celebrity. All the facets of his life come through in these letters – to women, editors, his German translator, fellow novelists and poets. His major prose works such as “Ham on Rye” and “Factotum” find their first shapes here, and readers should enjoy his championing of literary heroes like Celine and Fante, and his rubbishing of “dry as dust fakers” such as Stevens and Tate.

Author Biography

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, to an American soldier father and a German mother in 1920, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there 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).