“Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and theBeats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more naturallanguage. Bukowski moved it a little farther.” –Los Angeles Times Book ReviewIn what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowskidetails the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voiceof alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germanythrough acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries ofalcohol, woman, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D.H. Lawrence,Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of anoutcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

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