“Wordsworth Whitman William Carlos Williams and the Beats in their respective generations
moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther.” – Los Angeles
Times Book Review In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels Charles Bukowski
details the long lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego
Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high
school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol woman and the Los Angeles Public
Library's collection of D.H. Lawrence Ham on Rye offers a crude brutal and savagely funny
portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.
