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Charles Bukowski, Distinguished American Writer in Readings From His Works.

[Los Angeles]: UCLA Committee on Public Lectures and Office of Cultural and Recreational Affairs, 1973. Broadside, 11” x 8.5”. Printed in red on yellow card stock.

A scarce broadside advertising a Bukowski reading at the Sunset Canyon Recreation Center, with text stating that Jean Genet and John Paul Sartre considered him America’s foremost poet. Also included is a plug from John Williams Corrigan proclaiming that “What Wordsworth claimed to have in mind, what William Carlos Wiliams claimed to have done, what Rimbaud actually did do in French, Bukowski has accomplished for the American language.” Also from Corrigan, “It is precisely his refusal to become trapped in the cerebral that marks the savage quality, the surface dynamism, of Bukowski’s poetry.” A list of Bukowski’s publications follows the reviews.

A prolific published writer thanks to his relationship with Black Sparrow books (and its reliable $300 a month payments), Bukowski became a cult hero, depicting the depravity of urban life with sympathy for the downtrodden, through the lens of his own self-destructive experiences. The reading advertised here is one of five that Bukowski is known to have given in the Los Angeles area in 1973, probably to promote “While the Music Played” which had just been published by Black Sparrow. He also received in the same year a $5000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and an advance from City Lights for the re-issue of Notes of a Dirty Old Man. In 1974, he sold his literary archives to the UCSB. In the 1980’s, Bukowski wrote the screenplay for the movie Barfly, starring Mickey Rourke; released in 1987, the movie focuses on three days in the life of Bukowski at the age of twenty-four.

CONDITION: Good, damp stains along left margin, 1 cm spot right margin, horizontal crease.

Item #6006

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