Neighborhood children ridiculed his German accent and the clothing his parents made him wear. In the autobiographical Ham on Rye Charles Bukowski says that, with his mother's acquiescence, his father was frequently abusive, both physically and mentally, beating his son for the smallest imagined offence.During his youth Bukowski was shy and socially withdrawn, a condition exacerbated during his teens by an extreme case of acne. In the '30s the poet's father was often unemployed. The family settled in South Central Los Angeles in 1930, the city where Charles Bukowski's father and grandfather had previously worked and lived. They altered the pronunciation of the family name from /bu?'k?fski/ boo-kof-skee to /bu?'ka?ski/ boo-kow-ski, Bukowski's parents were Roman Catholic. Wanting a more Anglophone name, Bukowski's parents began calling their son 'Henry', which the poet would later change to Charles. On Apthey sailed from Bremerhaven to Baltimore, Maryland, where they settled. Given the crippling reparations being required of Germany and high levels of inflation Henry was unable to make a living, and so he decided to move the family back to America. After two years that family moved to Pfaffendorf. Charles Bukowski repeatedly claimed to be born out of wedlock, but Andernach marital records indicate that his parents married one month prior to his birth.His father set himself up as a building contractor, set to make great financial gains in the aftermath of the war. He had an affair with Katherina, the German sister of a friend, and she quickly became pregnant. The couple had four children, including Henry, Charles Bukowski's father.Ĭharles Bukowski's parents met in Andernach, in Western Germany following World War I, the poet's father posted as a sergeant in the American army of occupation following Germany's defeat in 1918. He worked as a carpenter, setting up his own very successful construction company. In Cleveland, Leonard met Emilie Krausse who had emigrated from Danzig, then part of Germany. Charles' paternal grandfather Leonard had emigrated to America from Germany in the 1880s. Charles' mother was a native German and his father was an American serviceman. he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero."Ĭharles Bukowski was born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Germany, to Heinrich Bukowski and Katharina (née Fett). Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, "the secret of Bukowski’s appeal. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a "laureate of American lowlife". Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer.
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