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Review [published December 2006]
Charles Bukowski: Born Into This
Pedro Blas Gonzalez
Charles Bukowski was a solitary man and a courageous
writer. Without daddy’s money to deliver him into high
places or the protective cloak of a godfather, Hank
forged his way through the world with the sweat of his
brow and the calluses on his hands.
Perhaps the greatest compliment that his readers can
afford him is that of being a self-made man. Publishing
houses, literary magazines – or otherwise – and
academic circles are all rife with opportunists, an
unlimited supply of self-promoters, bigots and moral
Lilliputians. These are all fine examples of the relative
and selective relativism that defines the radicalism of
late-modernity. Bukowski felt the wrath of all of these
entities throughout his life. But he had talent, and the
rest, as they say is history.
Bukowski’s story is one of genuine sentiment, determination
and a stubborn will that refused to become
objectified by the resistance that the world offers all true
visionaries. He went at it alone. An underground, cult
writer who did not readily attain popular acclaim until
the last decade of his life, Bukoswki’s body of work is a
testament to the working man – not the straw one that is
BUY Charles Bukowski books online from and
prostituted as a ‘theoretical’ entity – but rather one that
like Eric Hoffer, actually worked for a living. He was
born in Andernach, Germany in 1920.
When asked when he realized he was a writer, he
answered: “Nobody ever realizes they’re a writer. They
only think they’re a writer.” He began writing when
he was 13 years of age. He continues, “I just found a
pencil and I started writing. And I filled this notebook
full of words. This was the first time the mechanism
exposed itself.”
Bukowski: Born Into This is a documentary that
follows the trajectory of the writer’s life until his
death in 1994. Directed by John Dullaghan, what we
encounter in this film is an unadulterated and edgy
look at the writer of Post Office, Women, Factotum,
and Hot Water Music.
The film follows Bukowski through the 1940s as he
travelled the country gathering life experiences, through
his initial attempt at journalism in LA City College, his
poetry readings at San Francisco’s City Lights Poets
Theater, the women in his life and culminating with the
final months of his life. We witness Bukowski reading
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