Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. His great skill lay in making the writing of great poetry seem easy. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over 60 books. Writers including John Fante, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and others are noted as influences on Bukowski's writing. Between the ages of 24 and 26, Bukowski enjoyed a somewhat fortuitous period of his career. His short story, Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip, was published in Story magazine, followed by 20 Tanks from Kasseldown, which was published in a collection by the Black Sun Press. However, after this limited success, Bukowski gave up writing for almost a decade. It wasn’t until 1955 that Bukowski started writing again. By the start of 1967, Bukowski had begun to write the column ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’ for the underground Los Angeles newspaper Open City. When the paper was shut down, the column was taken up by both the Los Angeles Free Press and the NOLA Express in New Orleans. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of this column. Solid Citizen was recorded Live in Hamburg 1978. Enjoy free online English audiobook “Solid Citizen” by Charles Bukowski.
