On Writing

by Charles Bukowski

know about the almost-impossibility of survival. I worked for $17 a week in Louisiana and was fired when I asked for a 2 dollar a week raise. This was in 1941. I’ve worked in slaughterhouses, washed dishes; worked in a fluorescent light factory; hung posters in New York subways, scrubbed freightcars and washed passenger trains in the railroad yards; been a stock boy, a shipping clerk, a mailman, a bum, a gas station attendant, coconut man in a cake factory, a truck driver, a foreman in a book-distributing warehouse, a carrier of bottles of blood and a rubber tube squeezer for the Red Cross; crapshooter, horseplayer, madman, fool, god, I can’t remember them all, but reading your book a lot of it came back to me. I used to sign up for track gangs in order to travel about the country. I once went from New Orleans to Los Angeles this way; another time from L.A. to Sacramento.