“Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the
Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural
language. Bukowski moved it a little farther.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski
details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice
of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany
through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of
alcohol, 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 an
outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.