

- Fiction, Teenage boys, Alcoholics, Authors
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, women, 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.
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Character
Character-led, prestige, bleak and classical in form.
- character-ledplot-driven
- unpretentiousprestige
- warmbleak
- classical in formformally daring
- sparerichly built
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About the book
- Author
- Charles Bukowski
- First published
- 1982
- Pages
- 288
- Publisher
- Canongate, Rebel inc., Ecco
- Editions
- 11
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 9780061177583
Where to read
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On Open Library, 40 have read it and 133 want to.
“The first thing I remember is being under something.”
Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles, and is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. A prolific author, Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a "laureate of American lowlife."
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