Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Post Office | 1971 |
| Factotum | 1975 |
| Women | 1978 |
| Ham on Rye | 1982 |
| Hollywood | 1989 |
| Pulp | 1994 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts | 1965 |
| All the Assholes in the World and Mine | 1966 |
| Notes of a Dirty Old Man | 1969 |
| Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness | 1972 |
| South of No North | 1973 |
| Bring Me Your Love | 1983 |
| Hot Water Music | 1983 |
| Tales of Ordinary Madness | 1983 |
| The Most Beautiful Woman in Town | 1983 |
| There’s No Business | 1984 |
| Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook | 2008 |
| Absence of the Hero | 2010 |
| More Notes of a Dirty Old Man | 2011 |
| The Bell Tolls for No One | 2015 |
| On Drinking | 2019 |
Publication Order of Poetry Collections
| Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail | 1960 |
| Longshot Pomes for Broke Players | 1962 |
| Run with the Hunted | 1962 |
| It Catches My Heart in Its Hands | 1963 |
| Crucifix in a Deathhand | 1965 |
| Cold Dogs in the Courtyard | 1965 |
| The Genius of the Crowd | 1966 |
| At Terror Street and Agony Way | 1968 |
| Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window | 1968 |
| A Bukowski Sampler | 1969 |
| The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills | 1969 |
| Fire Station | 1970 |
| Mockingbird Wish Me Luck | 1972 |
| Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame | 1974 |
| Scarlet | 1976 |
| Maybe Tomorrow | 1977 |
| Love Is a Dog from Hell | 1977 |
| Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit | 1979 |
| Dangling in the Tournefortia | 1981 |
| War All the Time | 1984 |
| You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense | 1986 |
| The Roominghouse Madrigals | 1988 |
| Septuagenarian Stew | 1990 |
| In the Shadow of the Rose | 1991 |
| People Poems | 1991 |
| The Last Night of the Earth Poems | 1992 |
| Betting on the Muse | 1996 |
| Bone Palace Ballet | 1997 |
| What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire | 1999 |
| Open All Night | 2000 |
| The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps | 2001 |
| Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way | 2002 |
| The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain | 2004 |
| Slouching Toward Nirvana | 2005 |
| Come On In! | 2006 |
| The People Look Like Flowers at Last | 2007 |
| The Pleasures of the Damned | 2007 |
| The Continual Condition | 2009 |
| On Cats | 2015 |
| On Love | 2016 |
| Essential Bukowski: Poetry | 2016 |
| Storm for the Living and the Dead | 2017 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Shakespeare Never Did This | 1979 |
| The Bukowski/Purdy Letters | 1983 |
| Screams from the Balcony | 1993 |
| Living on Luck | 1995 |
| The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship | 1998 |
| Reach for the Sun | 1999 |
| Beerspit Night and Cursing | 2001 |
| On Writing | 2015 |
| The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing | 2018 |
About Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski (1920 to 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist and short story writer whose work is rooted in Los Angeles, the city where he spent most of his life. He wrote six novels, hundreds of short stories and thousands of poems about the lives of poor Americans, drinking, relationships with women, the act of writing and the drudgery of work, and published more than sixty books.
He was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Germany. His parents brought him to the United States in 1923 and the family moved to Los Angeles in 1930. After high school he spent two years at Los Angeles City College. A short story, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip”, appeared in Story magazine in 1944, but he then gave up writing for almost a decade, a period he later called a “ten-year drunk”. He began writing poetry after being treated for a near-fatal bleeding ulcer in 1954, and his first chapbook, “Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail”, was published in 1960.
Through the 1960s Bukowski worked as a filing clerk for the post office in Los Angeles while publishing with small presses and literary magazines. From 1967 he wrote the column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” for the underground newspaper Open City. In 1969 John Martin of Black Sparrow Press offered to support him, and Bukowski, then 49, left the post office to write full time. He finished his first novel, “Post Office”, less than a month later, and published almost all of his later major work with Black Sparrow.
Much of his fiction is semi-autobiographical and told through an alter ego, Henry Chinaski. “Ham on Rye” draws on his childhood and his violent father, and his last novel, “Pulp”, was completed shortly before his death.
Bukowski wrote the screenplay for the film “Barfly” (1987), in which Mickey Rourke played Chinaski opposite Faye Dunaway. Marco Ferreri’s “Tales of Ordinary Madness” (1981) was based on his short stories, and “Factotum” was filmed in 2005. During his lifetime he received little attention from American academic critics and was better received in Western Europe, especially Germany.
He died of leukaemia in San Pedro, Los Angeles, on 9 March 1994. More than half of his collections have appeared since his death, among them “Storm for the Living and the Dead” (2017) and “On Drinking” (2019).