'If a man truly desires to write, then he will.
Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him . . . There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it.'


Charles Bukowski was one of our most iconoclastic, raw and riveting writers, one whose stories, poems and novels have left an enduring mark on our culture. On Writing collects Bukowski's reflections and ruminations on the craft he dedicated his life to.

Piercing, unsentimental and often hilarious, On Writing is filled not only with memorable lines but also with the author's trademark toughness, leavened with moments of grace, pathos and intimacy. In the previously unpublished letters to editors, friends and fellow writers collected here, Bukowski is brutally frank about the drudgery of work and uncompromising when it comes to the absurdities of life and of art.

Always passionate, frequently funny, occasionally incoherent excerpts from a significant 20th-century American writer. — Kirkus Reviews

“The letters are a wild ride informed in equal parts by ego, alcoholism, misanthropy, erudition, and the genius, as Bukowski puts it, of one ‘touched by the grace of the word.” — Publishers Weekly

“By turns, the poet’s letters are humorous, boastful, self-deprecating, and angry at the world, but they are always entertaining. VERDICT: Bukowski fans will welcome this new collection tied to the celebration of what would have been his 95th birthday.” — Library Journal

Charles Bukowki’s stories, poems, and novels have left an enduring mark on our culture. In this collection of previously unpublished material—letters to publishers, editors, friends, and fellow writers—Bukowski shares his insights on the art of creation.

On Writing reveals an artist brutally frank about the drudgery of work, and canny and uncompromising about the absurdities of life—and of art. It illuminates the hard-edged, complex humanity of a true American legend and countercultural icon—the “laureate of American lowlife” (Time)—who stoically recorded society’s downtrodden and depraved. It exposes an artist grounded in the visceral, whose work reverberates with his central ideal: “Don’t try.”

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.