“Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.”

Charles Bukowski

“Factotum” (1975)

The popularity of author, poet, and essayist Charles Bukowski is an ebb and flow kind of thing, dependent on the whims of literary academia (which Bukowski detested with a cold passion) and the reading tastes of a certain demographic, mainly young men 16-35 years of age, groping their way in the world, uncertain of their future, cynical, despondent, leaning toward alcoholism and exploring the outer edges of misogyny. Bukowski speaks to this demographic, though it would be foolhardy to reduce the sum total of his work to the wants, needs, and desires of that herd.

In the last three weeks, as the economy continues to stumble about like a punch-drunk boxer, we have witnessed a boom in Charles Bukowski related search strings that are sending web surfers to Carver’s Dog, an almost 40% increase in Bukowski traffic overall. This is because, we can theorize, the poet laureate of Skid Row wrote so directly and eloquently about life among the downtrodden, the nameless, the faceless, people with one foot in the gutter and the other on a banana peel.

Charles Bukowski’s popularity looms much larger during economic hard times, eschewing the aforementioned 16-35 demographic and reaching out to readers who find themselves in a new and profoundly uncomfortable economic bracket. Bukowski speaks to the lost and the lonely, to the guy with holes in his shoes and ninety-five cents to his name and no Happy Hour on the horizon.