"Bukowski writes well, for one thing, with ear-pleasing cadences, wit and perfect clarity....There is real poignancy in the people encountered in his work.""--New York Times Book Review""Bukowski is the laureate of the Los Angeles underground, an eccentric who sees the world with a clarity of vision possessed only by artists and madmen.""--Los Angeles Times"

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.