Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany on August 16, 1920, the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. His lack of publishing success at this time caused him to give up writing in 1946 and spurred a ten-year stint of heavy drinking. After he developed a bleeding ulcer, he decided to take up writing again. He worked a wide range of jobs to support his writing, including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. He also worked in a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and he hung posters in New York City subways.

Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992), and the following books with City Lights Publishers: Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1981), The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories (1983), Tales of Ordinary Madness (1984), Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 (2008), Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays, Vol. 2: 1946-1992 (2010), More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns (2011), and The Bell Tolls for No One (2015). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.