Bukowski published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including Pulp (Black Sparrow, 1994), Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993), and The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992). He died of leukemia in San Pedro on March 9, 1994.
David Stephen Calonne was born in Los Angeles in 1953. He earned a B.A. in Ancient Greek from UCLA and a doctorate in English at the University of Texas at Austin where he wrote his dissertation on the works of William Saroyan. He has written several other books on writers including Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. A new critical study of Miller will appear from Reaktion Press in London in September of 2014. He is the editor of three volumes of Bukowski's uncollected prose for City Lights. He has lectured in Paris, at Columbia University, Penn, Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford.