Ham on Rye » (Reprint)

As famous for his notorious lifestyle as for his visceral poetry and prose, the late Charles Bukowski mined his experiences on America's mean streets to become one of the 20th century's most influential and widely imitated writers.

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, women, 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.