Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 - Hardcover

Bukowski, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0876859155 ISBN 13: 9780876859155

Publisher: Black Sparrow Books, 1993

Synopsis

In letters from the 1960s, the poet recounts his efforts to succeed as a writer, his inability to quit his day job, and his battles with manic depression and other illnesses

About this title

About the Author

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 more than 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.

From Publishers Weekly

This wonderful collection of letters chronicles Bukowski's life from his first days as a poet having meager success through his resignation from his postal job to pursue writing as his sole source of income. In between, the letters reveal in raw and uncensored fashion how a hard-drinking, hard-living man followed his own vision of poetic truth and artistic integrity. Earlier letters are written to the few editors, poets and admirers who had become aware of Bukowski's wild poetry. In them, we see the 40-year-old author struggling to make ends meet through an alcoholic stupor of which he is neither ashamed nor apologetic. We read of his thrill as his first book appears-- directly in the aftermath of the assassination of JFK. Even as his fame grows and his friends are convinced that he has made it, Bukowski remains in ill health and financial insecurity. The honesty, humor and lack of pretension in these letters make them a must for Bukowski fans and an engaging read for anyone interested in literary lives. Reproductions of letters and an afterword by Cooney round out the volume nicely.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0876859155
• ISBN 13: 9780876859155
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 372
• Editor: Cooney Seamus