BEFORE BUKOWSKI

WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH IN SCHOOLS

What they don't tell you in schools, including academia, is that gritty grass roots American writing created by those living at or near the bottom of society has been around long before Charles Bukowski. You can probably date it to Thomas Paine, and likely before that.

Crude popular publications were sold everywhere in the 1800s. In his book Beneath the American Renaissance David S. Reynolds credits such publications with hugely influencing the work of those 19th-century poets and novelists who today are taught in colleges-- Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Dickinson.

How do we classify Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which was self-published? As punk-style DIY far ahead of its time?

There's also the Lost Generation of the 1920s. At the center of that arts scene was writer and publisher Robert McAlmon. McAlmon edited and typed James Joyce's hand-written manuscript of Ulysses (which was then published in a small edition by bookstore owner Sylvia Beach); published Ernest Hemingway's first book, Three Stories & Ten Poems; and by all accounts led a hectic, alcohol-fueled life. McAlmon was the quintessential underground writer in that he's known today chiefly through other persons' memoirs-- his own work difficult to find, and even then available only in expurgated form. By all accounts it was raw, unaffected, authentic-- which is why it was criticized and dismissed by the literary mandarins of his time.

Personally, I've read only one story of McAlmon's-- "The Highly-Placed Pajamas"-- and that over twenty years ago. Not even sure in what book I found it-- I encountered it at a time I was browsing stacks in university libraries and distant corners of used-book stores. It's a tale about prostitutes. As I recall, the story was distinctly Bukowskiesque-- at the time it was written in the 1920s the established literary world wasn't ready for it.

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WHERE is underground publishing now?

One place to find it is at THE POP SHOP.