Tips for my Bachelor's theses secondary literature (1 Viewer)

[DanielJD]

Hello everyone,

I'm completing my last year at uni this year with a bachelor theses on the one and only Charles Bukowski. In the concrete, the name of my theses will probably be something like "The Ideals of American Counterculture in the works of Charles Bukowski".

I kindly ask you if you could help me with something, please. I'm currently in the process of gathering as much relevant information as possible, from many different sources. As there are a lot of you, who know much more about the great man than me, I thought you could maybe have a few tips on books, articles, etc. that could be helpful when writing my theses.

I'm mainly interested in stuff about his involvement with the counterculture movement, his religious and political beliefs, his relations with the Beat generation :) But please, feel free to suggest anything else that you might find relevant. Please suggest sites and articles that I can access for free or that are student-affordable.

Thank you in advance,

Daniel from the Czech Republic

 

[mjp]

I'm mainly interested in stuff about his involvement with the counterculture movement, his religious and political beliefs, his relations with the Beat generation...

He wrote a column that appeared in "counterculture" weeklies, but had no alliance to - or belief in - their ideologies. He said he never voted and had no religion, and he always maintained that he was not a Beat, and had no respect for their showboating and self-aggrandizement.

So I think you may have a hard time finding anything contrary to that, anything that shows his involvement in any of those things, if you believe what he said and wrote about himself.

But then being outside of mainstream culture as well as the "counterculture" may make him the most genuinely counterculture person the 60s and 70s ever knew.

 

[tony walton]

The documentary "Born into This" (2003) and the Taylor Hackford 1973 documentary(black and white) are both excellent audio/visual sources to get you started. Both are on youtube, with the Taylor Hackford documentary uploaded in parts (perhaps 7, not sure).

 

[DanielJD]

Thank you so much, will definitely check them out :)

 

[Pogue Mahone]

Here's a couple for you
https://bukowskiforum.com/threads/any-one-else-think-bukowski-was-an-anarchist.3576/#post-126547

If you can find it, this is worth reading as well:
https://web.archive.org/web/2020/https://bukowski.net/database/detail.php?WorkNumber=2402