“The library was another world,” Bukowski said, “another people. His discovery of the local library is probably what saved him. Decades later he chronicled these pained, cruel years in his novel Ham on Rye. He became defiant, a scrapper, very much the rebel. He had few friends and, as with many a sensitive kid, rebellion ensued. As an adolescent he was afflicted with severe acne, which ravaged his face and upper torso with boils these scars, both inner and outer, never left him. His father, a strict perfectionist, beat him for minor childhood failings.

A sullen and lonely child, Bukowski was teased in grammar school for the slight German accent he hadn’t lost yet. When he was three, the family returned to live in Los Angeles. Henry Charles Bukowski was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany to a German mother and American G.I. “Fear made me a writer,” he said, “fear and a lack of confidence.” This year marks the centennial of Bukowski’s birth and, along with a new documentary film ( Arts Fuse review) and reissues of some of his numerous books, comes this illuminating biography. When Ernest Hemingway was once asked to describe the best preparation for being a writer, he cracked, “an unhappy childhood.” Charles Bukowski stands as a testament to that truism. Black Sparrow Press, 376 pages, $18.95 (softcover). Some of the most insightful and moving parts of the biography are Neeli Cherkovski’s personal recounting of his on-again off again relationship with Charles Bukowski.īukowski, A Life: The Centennial Edition by Neeli Cherkovski.

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