Screams from the Balcony
About this ebook
Screams from the Balcony is a collection of letters chronicling Charles Bukowski's life as he tries to get published and work at a postal office, all while drinking and gambling.
These letters follow his routine across a decade of small-press battles, typed out between graveyard shifts and nursing hangovers. Bukowski details his exchanges with independent editors, weathering broken typewriters and constant rejection slips.
The volume gathers unvarnished reflections on American literature and postal labor in Los Angeles. The author confronts academic coteries with biting humor, recording his daily survival on beer, radio symphonies, and bets at the local tracks.
- Literary Correspondence: Frank, unedited letters sent to figures like New Orleans publishers Jon and Louise Webb, Canadian poet Al Purdy, and German translator Carl Weissner reveal Bukowski's candid assessments of contemporaries from Allen Ginsberg to Ernest Hemingway.
- Dirty Realism: Unsparing dispatches capture the grit of Los Angeles rooming houses, chronic ailments, and the 1955 charity hospital transfusions that propelled his return to writing at age thirty-five.
- Against the Odds: Long before achieving commercial stability, Bukowski scraped together thirty-dollar contributions to help handset printers like E. V. Griffith produce his earliest poetry chapbooks.
- Raw Honesty: Intimate notes chronicle his private world as a father to his infant daughter Marina, balancing domestic devotion with the dread of postal investigations over his underground newspaper columns.
- Also by This Author: Essential Bukowski, On Cats and On Writing.
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About the author
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 two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.
