In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski detail
s 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 a
cne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, woman,
and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D.H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye off
ers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age d
uring the desperate days of the Great Depression.
