| Abstrakt: |
Poet. Transforming ordinary events into monuments of alienation and despair, Charles Bukowski (byew-KOW-skee) transformed his private agony into a poetry with universal implications. At the age of two, Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr., emigrated from Germany with his parents, who settled in Los Angeles. A victim of child abuse, Bukowski started drinking at an early age to escape the pain of his father’s violent discipline and unrealistic expectations. Images of alcoholism pervade Bukowski’s texts and function as a backdrop for all his other subjects. The topic of many of his poems and stories, as well as the novel Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s difficult childhood created in him a disdain for the bourgeois idealism touted by Henry, Sr., and fomented a fear of intimacy that would continue for much of his life. Bukowski matriculated at Los Angeles City College in 1939 but left in 1941, partly because of his resistance to the overzealous anti-German propagandizing of his instructors and classmates. Throughout his career, Bukowski challenged the automaton-like acceptance of conventional “wisdom” and explored the nuances of a seamier, grittier existence. |
