Charles Bukowski

Born in Germany in 1920, Heinrich Karl Bukowski landed in Los Angeles and spent decades grinding through post offices and rooming houses, writing thousands of poems and hundreds of stories for small presses that would take them. He published extensively from the early 1940s through the early 1990s, eventually releasing over sixty books - among them Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window and Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame - most gathered later by John Martin's Black Sparrow Press. Time called him a "laureate of American lowlife." American academia mostly ignored him while he lived, but Western Europe, especially Germany, paid attention. He died in March 1994, leaving a body of work about drinking, writing, women, and the drudgery that fills the space between - all of it pulled from the ordinary wreckage he refused to dress up.