The unrepentantly alcoholic Charles Bukowski was one of America’s most iconoclastic, raw and riveting writers, a hard-living crank whose stories, poems and novels left an enduring mark – some would say scar – on the L.A. literary canon.
Unlike Stephen King’s excellent On Writing, this isn’t a structured handbook for wannabe scribes. Rather it’s a hit-and-miss collection of Bukowski’s letters to various editors, friends and fellow writers. There have already been several collections of his literary correspondence, but apparently these are all previously unpublished.
It’s something of a barrel-scraping exercise, then, though some of these missives are hilarious. Bukowski is brutally frank about the drudgery of work and as determined and uncompromising as you’d expect when it comes to his chosen path.
“Well, I’m 34 now,” he declares in a 1955 letter to editor Whit Burnett. “If I don’t make it by the time I’m 60, I’m just going to give myself 10 more years.”