Charles Bukowski: An Unlikely Hero

Charles Bukowski was a renowned underground writer who explored the harsh reality of low class life in the latter half of the 20th century. His use of direct and vulgar language to explain the often violent and graphic situations he wrote about in his poems and stories lead many critics to view his work as shallow and purposely offensive, while others were fascinated by this “dirty realism”. (Cengage)

Bukowski had many heroic qualities, although not by demonstrating the classical abilities of a hero. He was brave for not whitewashing or watering down anything that he wrote, and he was humble by not explicitly writing about himself.

Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, on August 16th, 1920. He was fond of claiming he was born to unmarried parents, but this is not true, as his parents married a month before he was born. His birth name was Heinrich Karl Bukowski, however, when his family moved the United States when Bukowski was three, they began calling him Henry in order to sound more American. Bukowski had a tenuous relationship with his father, whom he would later accuse of beating him throughout his childhood on many occasions. Bukowski was awkward and antisocial as a child, and broke out in a severe case of acne when he was 14, which furthered his social problems. (Bukowski.net) During his early teen years, a friend invited him over to his parents’ wine cellar, and served Charles his first drink. Bukowski would later write that “It was magic, why hadn’t someone told me?” (Poetry foundation)

Bukowski’s first short story and poems were published in the publication Write, in 1940. No known of these works exist, his first work that we have available today was The Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip, which was...

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.... However, unlike the classical heroes, he was the one who recorded his own travels, offering a bit of his own insight into the way the world worked. He pioneered a new style of writing, and changed the way people looked at stories, as his focused on a character’s story, but also on his own story. Charles Bukowski was a hero in the sense that he was not afraid to go out and explore the world, and he was not afraid to tell the world exactly what he saw and what he thought of it.

Works Cited

"Bukowski, Charles - Introduction." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Justin Karr Editor. Vol. 45. Gale Cengage, 2001. eNotes.com. 2006. 22 Feb, 2010

Bukowski.net. 1 Jan 2010. smog.net, Web. 22 Feb 2010.

"Charles Bukowski." Poetry Foundation. 2010. Poetry Foundation,

Web. 22 Feb 2010.

Greenberg, Michael. "Fiction." Boston Review 1994, Print.