It all started with a single, furious letter.
That’s a fair trade. What’s your favorite Bukowski letter or poem? Let me know in the comments.
Bukowski’s response was not one of gratitude. It was one of rage. On a night in 1964, fueled by cheap wine and existential dread, Bukowski wrote back to John Martin. The letter (dated March 29, 1964) is now legendary. It begins with typical Bukowski grit: “I am going to take your offer. But I want you to know what you are getting into. I am a man of no talent, only rage. I drink. I fight. I disappear for weeks. I will miss deadlines. I will send you pages stained with wine and cigarette ash.” But then, in the middle of the letter, Bukowski stops complaining. He shifts from self-loathing to confession. He writes what might be the most honest mission statement of his entire career: “I have one advantage: I have lived the life of a loser. I have slept in doorways. I have watched the whores and the drunks and the madmen. I have felt the air and the light and the time and the space. Nobody else is writing about these people. They are writing about tea parties and middle-class neurosis. I write about the blood in the gutter.” Martin didn’t flinch. He printed the letter (as he printed nearly all of Bukowski’s letters) and sent back a one-word reply: “Start.” Why This Letter Matters That exchange—the rage, the vulnerability, and the acceptance—became the blueprint for the next 30 years. Bukowski quit the Post Office in 1969. He wrote Post Office in three wild weeks. He followed it with Factotum , Women , and Ham on Rye . charles bukowski letter to john martin
Martin was a young, idealistic publisher who had just started a tiny press called Black Sparrow . He had read a few of Bukowski’s stories and was obsessed. Martin didn’t just want to publish Bukowski’s next poem; he wanted to rescue Bukowski from the postal service entirely. He offered him a deal that no publisher had ever dared to offer: $100 a month for life . In exchange, Bukowski would quit the Post Office and write full-time.
People misinterpret this. They think it means laziness. But read the letter to John Martin. “Don’t try” doesn’t mean sit on the couch. It means stop forcing the fake version. Stop writing for the tea party crowd. Just live. Feel the air and the light and the time and the space. And if you do that honestly, the art will find you. It all started with a single, furious letter
John Martin gave Bukowski air, light, time, and space. In return, Bukowski gave the world his open vein.
In 1964, a 44-year-old Bukowski was stuck. He had spent a decade working a dead-end job at the Los Angeles Post Office, drinking himself into oblivion, and publishing sporadically in small underground magazines. He was angry, tired, and convinced his life was a failure. Let me know in the comments
If you know Charles Bukowski, you know the myth: the dirty old man of American letters, the drunken poet laureate of Skid Row, a man who claimed he wrote only to survive. But behind that myth is a business partnership so strange, so volatile, and so successful that it changed the course of 20th-century literature.
Enter John Martin.
Without John Martin, Bukowski might have died an unknown alcoholic civil servant. Without Bukowski, John Martin would have run just another small poetry press.