On Authors and Lowlifes

Ten Things You Didn't Know About Charles Bukowski

The lowlife laureate of Los Angeleswas born in Germany.

He worked in a slaughterhouse, a dog biscuit factory, and a cookie factory. (Not sure which ones allowed free samples!)

The FBI arrested him for draft evasion during WWII. (He later failed the psychological exam and was classified unfit for service.)

While in jail, he shared a cell with Courtney Taylor, who would later appear on the FBI's ten most wanted list for forging checks. (And draft cards!)

Many years later the FBI monitored his underground newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man. (No word on whether J. Edgar Hoover personally assigned the agent to read it.)

His first novel, The Post Office, was written when he worked for the post office. (How cool would it be to discover Charles Bukowski delivered your mail?)

He not only wrote the screenplay for Barfly, a film based on his life, he also made a cameo as, what else, a barfly. (He actually has a lengthy IMDB page.)

He liked to drink during his poetry readings (and most other times), and audience members would often pass beer to him during the performance.

Three Buddhist monks presided over his funeral, chanting below a floral banner reading "Hank." (His first name was Henry.)

His gravestone reads "Don't try," which sums up his philosophy on writing, and life. (Which he may have considered interchangeable.)

Why Blog About Charles Bukowski?

Because he might have been one of the unlikeliest success stories in all of author-dom.

Here was a man who spent decades doing everything you're not supposed to do if you want to be taken seriously as a writer. He drank too much. He worked lousy jobs. He lived in places that were not, by any measure, conducive to the literary life. He didn't go to the right schools or know the right people or workshop his poems with distinguished faculty.

He just wrote. Constantly, obsessively, with no particular expectation that anyone would care. And then, eventually, people cared enormously.

What Bukowski Understood About Writing

"Don't try" sounds like terrible advice until you understand what he meant by it. He wasn't saying don't bother. He was saying don't perform. Don't write the way you think a writer is supposed to write. Don't dress it up to impress someone. Don't try to be literary. Just write what's true.

It's the same thing that makes a memoir work or not work. The ones that last aren't the ones with the prettiest sentences. They're the ones where you can feel that the person writing them couldn't have said it any other way, where the specific weight of a specific life comes through on the page.

Bukowski had that. Whether you like his subject matter or not, and plenty of people don't, there's no question that what he wrote was unmistakably his.

The Life of a Lowlife

There's a version of the Bukowski story that's just about the drinking and the bad behavior, but that version's boring. The more interesting version is about a person who had stories that needed to come out and who, despite every obstacle, including himself, found a way to get them out.

Most people aren't Bukowski. Most people aren't trying to be. But most people do have stories, real ones, lived ones, the kind that don't need to be invented because they actually happened. And most of those stories are sitting untold for reasons that have nothing to do with their quality.

Maybe the person who lived the story doesn't think of themselves as a writer. Maybe they've started and stopped a dozen times. Maybe they know what they want to say but can't find the shape of it.

That's what we're here for.

If you'd like to tell your story but don't know how to start, call us at 1-323-539-7635 or drop us an email.

Especially if you're a lowlife.

You probably have some pretty good stories.