What is the setting of The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories by Charles Bukowski?

The collection, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories, like most of Charles Bukowski's fiction, is largely autobiographical. Bukowski spends most all of his life in various poorer parts Los Angeles, drinking, picking up women, writing short stories for underground publications, and doing as little physical work as he can and still afford an apartment, alcohol, and small amounts of food. In several of the stories, Bukowski works for the U.S. Post Office, as in real life for ten years. He depicts himself quitting that hated job to write full-time.

Bukowski pictures drab hotel rooms, bars, whorehouses, itinerant job placement centers, hospital wards for the indigent, and race tracks. A few mention landmarks: the Hollywood Hills, the famous Richfield Building, McArthur Park, 6th and Union, Beverly Blvd., Melrose Ave., and the Vermont turnoff from the Hollywood Freeway. Some stories are set in the Venice Beach section of Los Angeles, the Hollywood Park racetrack, a Hollywood mansion.

Two stories take place elsewhere in the United States: Bukowski visits one of the largest cities in Texas, where he lodges in a whorehouse to save money, and the French Quarter of New Orleans, where he lodges with an obese lady whom he comes to love. One story finds him, several fellow ex patriots, and some standoffish Arab workers, in an unspecified foreign country, thousands of miles from home, in a war zone where the cease-fire truce is not working.