Charles Bukowski died of leukemia in 1994, but you’d hardly know it. In the years since, his longtime editor has overseen the publication of a shelf of books, including three volumes of letters and at least ten of new poems (of which the most recent, published a couple of years ago, was supposed to be the very last). Now comes The Continual Condition, as if there will never be an end.[1] You can’t blame his heirs for shoving into print all the Bukowski they can, but you’d like some sense of the reserves—are they the size of the Genizah at Cairo? The North Sea oil fields? At this rate, in a few more years he’ll have published more books from the grave than he published while alive.

Bukowski was the great littérateur of American lowlife. His father was an American soldier in the Great War, his mother a German war bride. The family settled in Los Angeles, where Bukowski later slaved at odd jobs, working for long stints at the post office as letter carrier and mail sorter, but his true occupations were gambler, barfly, and sidewalk Casanova. Like a lot of angry young men, he had literary ambitions.

Before the advent of oral history, there were few memoirs from what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat; and those were some- times given the gilded touch by editors, when they were not forged outright. Writing well requires some measure of education, but not so much