Paperback, 283 pages
English language
Published Nov. 7, 2002 by Ecco.
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.
I read more Bukowski than I care to admit in my 20s. I’m retrospect, as a far kinder and more compassionate person in my 40s This is the only book worth reading by him.
