mjp
Founding member
John Fante: The Man Who Made Bukowski
It seems obvious that Fante influenced Bukowski, but it's always seemed odd to me that there was a long stretch - 15 years, give or take - after Bukowski read Ask The Dust where he didn't really put what he said he loved about Fante's writing into practice:
You can look at that and say, 'Well that describes Bukowski's work, so obviously Fante's influence made him the kind of writer he was,' but that doesn't explain the decade and a half of Bukowski's more formal, for lack of a better word, writing. He certainly didn't write with "a superb simplicity" for many years after reading Ask The Dust.
It seems obvious that Fante influenced Bukowski, but it's always seemed odd to me that there was a long stretch - 15 years, give or take - after Bukowski read Ask The Dust where he didn't really put what he said he loved about Fante's writing into practice:
"The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humor and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity."
You can look at that and say, 'Well that describes Bukowski's work, so obviously Fante's influence made him the kind of writer he was,' but that doesn't explain the decade and a half of Bukowski's more formal, for lack of a better word, writing. He certainly didn't write with "a superb simplicity" for many years after reading Ask The Dust.