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 three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published
his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of
thirty-five. He died in San Pedro California on March 9 1994 at the age of seventy-three
shortly after completing his last novel Pulp.
