SOURCE: “The Fascination of the (Extra)Ordinary: The Short Stories of Charles Bukowski,” in Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski, Black Sparrow Press, 1994, pp. 249-79.

In the following essay, Harrison traces the development of Bukowski's short fiction.

I started with the short story, starving in little rooms around the country and drinking too much cheap wine, and I'd mail the things out to THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY or HARPERS and when they came back I tore them up. I used to write 8 or 10 stories a week. All I'd do was write these stories and drink as much as possible.¹

Bukowski has published about two hundred short stories. He began almost compulsively writing short stories in early adolescence and broke into print in Story magazine in the mid-1940s.² After several additional publications, he abandoned the form for almost twenty years. Although he returned to it with some...