Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski (1920 1994), poet laureate of the drunk and downtrodden, was an authentic folk-genius of the American vernacular. For Russell Harrison, he was also a "social lyricist" a proletarian poet who saw life-on-the-job in the United States as deadening, demoralizing, yet also the stuff of art. In this collection of essays on Bukowski's poetry and fiction, Harrison is at his most original when tracing influences on the artist's work (from the Surrealists to Jackie Gleason) and when offering us Buk as the anti-Ben Franklin (that is, as the man who defined success as refusing the American Dream).