Bukowski's financial situation 1959 (1 Viewer)

rereading Howard Sounes's "Locked in the arms" biography and curious if anyone has any information on how he coped with the $15,000 approximately worth $133,000 today,that he inherited on his Fathers death in 1959.
 
Well, I imagine first he had to pay the remainder of the mortgage, which was more than half the sale price. He ended up with $7000 (about $62k in today's dollars), which probably went into the bank and stayed there.

He was working as a postal clerk at the time, and by all accounts, he was pretty cheap, so it's unlikely he spent the $7000 (regardless of what he may have written about blowing the money on gambling in poems or stories).

It's worth noting that he wrote about having $90,000 in savings in 1970. That number is probably exaggerated (unless there was another inheritance that we don't know about), but he always had money in the bank. From the 1960s onward at least, and probably well back into the 1950s.
 

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