"Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them."
I wouldn't say Bukowski was a bag of sunshine, or particularly optimistic. He was a drunk, womaniser, gambler and made no excuses for how he chose to be and the life he chose to live. For his honesty, I can't help but love him. He wrote plainly and frankly appealing to a whole new generation of writers. His subject: the ordinary lives of poor America. He was among the first group of writers to focus their attention to what played out directly before them. Time magazine described him as "a laureate of American lowlife."
Working for over a decade as a filing clerk, and spending various stages of his life highly drunk, he makes for an unlikely success story. He began full time writing at 49 saying "I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy ... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve."
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