SOURCE: “Madman Incarnate,” in New Leader, Vol. 56, April 16, 1973, p. 19–20.

In the following review of Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, Evanier addresses Bukowski's popularity and maintains that “the gutsy, audacious quality of Bukowski's writing loses some of its freshness in this collection.”

Upon returning to my favorite Berkeley bookstore haunts last fall, I was amazed to find stacks upon stacks of sexually perverse comic books replacing the old stock of literary and political journals my parents, I, and last year's student body had grown up with. Apparently, the latest campus generation has little interest in even those writers who try to discard the old forms in order to understand the irrationality of us all: Ionesco, Beckett, Kafka, Céline, Pinter, Barthelme, etc. In fact, many young people seem to have opted for no literature at all. Such recent counterculture gurus as Hermann Hesse, J. R...