Full name: Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life

Author: Howard Sounes Year: 1998 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Biographies, Poetry, Memoirs Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780802136978 9781543624120 0802136974 154362412X

A former postman and long-term alcoholic who did not become a full-time writer until middle age, Charles Bukowski was the author of autobiographical novels that captured the low life--including Post Office, Factotum, and Women--and made him a literary celebrity, with a major Hollywood film (Barfly) based on his life. Drawing on new interviews with virtually all of Bukowski's friends, family, and many lovers; unprecedented access to his private letters and unpublished writing; and commentary from Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, R. Crumb, and Harry Dean Stanton, Howard Sounes has uncovered the extraordinary true story of the Dirty Old Man of American literature. Illustrated with drawings by Bukowski and over sixty photographs, Charles Bukowski is a must for Bukowski devotees and new readers alike. As the Los Angeles Times noted, "Bukowski is one of those writers people remember more for the legend than for the work....but, as Howard Sounes shows in this exhaustively researched biography, it wasn't the whole story." Similar books: Hank by Neeli Cherkovski Charles Bukowski by Barry Miles Anais by Noel Riley Fitch Howard Hughes by Donald L. Barlett A Tragic Honesty by Blake Bailey Simenon by Pierre Assouline The Life of Raymond Chandler by Frank MacShane The World Is What It Is by Patrick French A Lot to Ask by Hazel Holt Cheever by Blake Bailey Nancy Reagan by Kitty Kelley Savage Art by Robert Polito Tove Jansson by Tuula Karjalainen Albert Camus by Herbert R. Lottman Truman Capote by George Plimpton The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm Her Husband by Diane Middlebrook Sylvia Plath by Linda Wagner-Martin I Celebrate Myself by Bill Morgan Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson