He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career.

[10][15] Afterwards, Bukowski's father became a building contractor, set to make great financial gains in the aftermath of the war, and after two years moved the family to Pfaffendorf (today part of Koblenz).

However, given the crippling postwar reparations being required of Germany, which led to a stagnant economy and high levels of inflation, he was unable to make a living and decided to move the family to the U.S. On April 18, 1923, they sailed from Bremerhaven to Baltimore, Maryland, where they settled.

In the autobiographical Ham on Rye, Bukowski says that, with his mother's acquiescence, his father was frequently abusive, both physically and mentally, beating his son for the smallest imagined offense.

[20] After graduating from high school in 1939, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College for two years, taking courses in art, journalism, and literature, before quitting at the start of World War II.

Two years later, another short story, "20 Tanks from Kasseldown", was published by the Black Sun Press in Issue III of Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly, a limited-run, loose-leaf broadside collection printed in 1946 and edited by Caresse Crosby.

Failing to break into the literary world, Bukowski grew disillusioned with the publication process and quit writing for almost a decade, a time that he referred to as a "ten-year drunk".

These "lost years" formed the basis for his later semiautobiographical chronicles, and there are fictionalized versions of Bukowski's life through his highly stylized alter-ego, Henry Chinaski.

[10] In the early 1950s, he took a job as a fill-in letter carrier with the United States Post Office Department in Los Angeles, but resigned just before he reached three years' service.

[22] By 1960, Bukowski had returned to the post office in Los Angeles and began work as a letter filing clerk, a position he held for more than a decade.

Griffith, editor of Hearse Press, published Bukowski's first separately printed publication, a broadside titled "His Wife, the Painter," in June 1960.

[23] Beginning in 1967, Bukowski wrote the column Notes of a Dirty Old Man for Los Angeles' Open City, an underground newspaper.

When Open City was shut down in 1969, the column was picked up by the Los Angeles Free Press as well as the hippie underground paper NOLA Express in New Orleans.

In 1969, Bukowski accepted an offer from Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin and quit his post office job to dedicate himself to full-time writing.

As a measure of respect for Martin's financial support and faith in a relatively unknown writer, Bukowski published almost all of his subsequent major works with Black Sparrow Press, which became a highly successful enterprise.

[26] Bukowski's other affairs were with a recording executive and a twenty-three-year-old redhead; he wrote a book of poetry as a tribute to his love for the latter, titled, "Scarlet" (Black Sparrow Press, 1976).

[27] In 1976, Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle, a health food restaurant owner, rock-and-roll groupie, aspiring actress, heiress to a small Philadelphia "Main Line" fortune and devotee of Meher Baba.

Two years later he moved from the East Hollywood area, where he had lived for most of his life, to the harborside community of San Pedro,[28] the southernmost district of Los Angeles.

In 1972, Joe Wolberg, who was the manager of City Lights Books in San Francisco, rented a hall and paid Bukowski to read his poems.

His last international performance was in October 1979 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and was released on DVD as There's Gonna Be a God Damn Riot in Here.

The reading was produced by fan/friend Dennis Del Torre, who rented a venue, Viking Hall, paid Bukowski and his wife Linda to fly up, hired a video crew, promoted the event, and sold tickets.

Whenever my wife Lucia would come with me to visit him he'd play the Man role, but one night she couldn't come I got to Buk's place and found a whole different guy—easy to get along with, relaxed, accessible.

Ecco Press continues to release new collections of his poetry, culled from the thousands of works published in small literary magazines.

[34] Writers including John Fante,[35] Knut Hamsun,[35] Louis-Ferdinand Céline,[35] Ernest Hemingway,[36] Robinson Jeffers,[36] Henry Miller,[35] D. H. Lawrence,[36] Fyodor Dostoevsky,[36] Du Fu[36] Li Bai,[36] and James Thurber are noted as influences on Bukowski's writing.

I can't see any other place than L.A."[25] Bukowski also performed live readings of his works, beginning in 1962 on radio station KPFK in Los Angeles and increasing in frequency through the 1970s.

[37] Bukowski could also be generous; for example, after a sold-out show at Amazingrace Coffeehouse in Evanston, Illinois, on November 18, 1975, he signed and illustrated over 100 copies of his poem "Winter," published by No Mountains Poetry Project.

One critic has described Bukowski's fiction as a "detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free", an image he tried to live up to with sometimes riotous public poetry readings and boorish party behavior.

[43] One example of a popular poem, "Roll the Dice" (when comparing the original manuscript to "What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire"), themes such as hell and alcoholism are removed.

[45][better source needed] Charles Bukowski was the inspiration behind the first chapter of Mark Manson's bestselling self-help book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.

His problems with drugs, women and alcoholism despite being a bestselling writer were discussed in the chapter titled "Don't Try" – a reference to the epitaph on the author's gravestone.