The American Schoolyard: A Critical Study of Charles Bukowski's Short Fiction

Charles Bukowski is one of America's most prolific writers. He has published forty-five books of poetry and prose and is translated in over a dozen languages, Recently he wrote the screenplay for the movie Barfly. However, despite his accomplishments, Bukowski has received little critical attention from the academic world. It is thought that his works are too violent or too pornographic to be deserving of critical attention. In this thesis, I attempt to show that this is not the case. Using Marxist, feminist, and Freudian analyses of Bukowski's short fiction, I show that Bukowski's work is, without a doubt, worthy of academic study.