Fly Like a Bat Out of Hell: The Letters of Harold Norse and Charles Bukowski

by Harold Norse, Charles Bukowski (Joint Author)

Fly Like a Bat Out of Hell collects the almost fifteen-year correspondence between two of America's most influential modern poets, Harold Norse and Charles Bukowski. Norse, then a tenuously established writer, acolyte of William Carlos Williams and one-time resident of the Beat Hotel, began exchanging letters with the fledgling bard of the downtrodden, Bukowski, in 1963. Their daily struggle for self-determination, recognition, and just a little money provides the dramatic arc of their ribald, thoughtful, often licentious, and always quotable correspondence. Sparring and exhorting, comforting and recriminating in terrific counterpoint, outdoing one another in scatological complaint, Norse and Bukowski intimately reveal the seldom seen realities of creative lives.

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2002

About the author

Harold Norse was an American writer, openly gay, who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.