Ham On Rye

“Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the
Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural
language. Bukowski moved it a little farther.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review
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, woman, 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.

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 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.