Post Office

Charles Bukowski’s Post Office reflects the intimate connection between the author’s lived experiences and his literary voice. Born in 1920 in Germany to a German mother and American father, Bukowski was raised in Los Angeles and spent much of his early life on the margins of society, experiencing poverty, alcoholism, and alienation.

His brief stints at various low-paying jobs, the main subject of his 1975 novel, Factotum, culminated in more than a decade of employment with the US Postal Service, where he worked first as a substitute carrier and later as a clerk. These years of labor directly inform the content of Post Office, making the novel one of the clearest examples of autofiction (autobiographical fiction) in modern American literature. Through his alter ego, Hank Chinaski, Bukowski transforms the routine drudgery of his daily life into biting satire and personal testimony, showing how bureaucratic systems wear down workers’ bodies and spirits.

Bukowski’s cult following propelled him out of the poverty and instability he struggled with for most of his early life. He authored more than 40 novels and poetry collections, and one screenplay, for the film Barfly. Bukowski’s most famous poems include the late works A Following and So You Want to Be a Writer. His novels include Post Office (1971), Women (1978), and Ham on Rye (1982), all of which feature his alter ego, Hank Chinaski, as the protagonist.

Bukowski’s reputation before Post Office was largely tied to his underground poetry, published in small presses and alternative magazines. His style, often described as raw, vulgar, and direct, eschewed literary formalism in favor of plainspoken realism, garnering him the nickname “The Dirty Old Man.” By 1969, after gaining a cult following, he quit the post office to pursue writing full-time, encouraged by publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, who considered Bukowski the new Walt Whitman. Martin offered him a $100 monthly stipend to produce novels, and Martin encouraged him to write Post Office. Post Office, published in 1971, became Bukowski’s first full-length prose work and introduced a larger audience to his “Chinaski cycle” of semi-autobiographical novels.

As an author, Bukowski blurs the line between memoir and fiction. His approach aligns with the countercultural rejection of polished, middle-class ideals, instead foregrounding the voices of society’s outsiders: those with alcohol addiction, failed lovers, gamblers, and blue-collar workers. While some critics take issue with the vulgar, violent, and sexual imagery and themes he frequently uses, Bukowski didn’t valorize the lifestyle or the characters he depicted. Proponents of his work claim that his writing satirizes the toxic masculinity, violence, and excess that he depicts. Recognizing the novel as a direct outgrowth of Bukowski’s life emphasizes how his artistic project was less about inventing characters than about documenting reality in its most abrasive form.