What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

by Charles Bukowski

Overview

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter

What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire is the second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski that takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 1970s to the 1990s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574231052
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/01/2002
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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.

Date of Birth:

August 16, 1920

Date of Death:

March 9, 1994

Place of Birth:

Andernach, Germany

Place of Death:

San Pedro, California

Education:

Los Angeles City College, 2 years

Editorial Reviews

A literary garden requires ''plenty of manure,'' Bukowski once said to John Martin, and this collection gathers a good deal of tossed-off fertilizer along with the blooms. But it stands in spite of this -- or perhaps because of it? -- as a testament to outward sloth and a fierce, inverted work ethic, a belief in self-help through unending self-attention, a refusal to waste even the smallest table scrap of world or time. ''The word should be like / butter or avocados or / steak or hot biscuits, or onion rings or / whatever is really / needed,'' he writes in ''Christmas Poem to a Man in Jail.'' ''Maybe if we write well enough / and live a little better / life will improve a bit / just out of shame.''
—The New York Times Book Review

Jennifer Schuessler