The Pleasures of the Damned Selected Poems 1951-1993

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. At the forefront of American counter-culture, his Beat Generation writing is widely celebrated. He was born in Germany in 1920 to an American soldier father and a German mother and was brought to the United States at the age of three. He grew up in Los Angeles and lived there for the majority of his life.

During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books, including novels such as Factotum, Post Office and Ham on Rye. He died in 1994 shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

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 Andernach, Germany, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry when he was thirty-five.

Bukowski acknowledged influences including Anton Chekhov, James Thurber, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ernest Hemingway, John Fante, D. H. Lawrence and e.e. cummings, though he achieved a distinctive sensibility and voice in his work that set him apart as one of the most iconic writers of the twentieth century.

He died in San Pedro, California, on 9 March 1994, at age seventy-three, having published over forty-five books of poetry and prose.