Here's a scanned copy of Buk's letter to me regarding the Neeli Cherkovski Buk biography called: HANK: THE LIFE OF CHARLES BUKOWSKI (Random House, 1991). Since this letter was written the book has been re-issued in paperback and renamed. Now it's called BUKOWSKI: A LIFE (Steerforth Press, 1997). But a friend who read it said it wasn't much better than the original edition which is now out of print. He e-mailed me with this: "Yeah, I got ripped off by Cherkovski again. $18.95 for the same book with a little, very little, fire thrown in, and he (Neeli) comes off as a weak Buk groupie hanging around in the shadows waiting for Buk to accept him as a poet, and of course, this never happened." After getting this cool ass letter from Buk, I excitedly wrote to Dan Nielsen, who used to put out Blank Gun Silencer, that I was gonna publish the letter in Experiment In Words #9 (Fall, 1992). He wrote back telling me (this is paraphrased from my memory of his letter), "You shouldn't publish that letter. It'll hurt Neeli's feelings." Fuck that, I said. Fuck anybody's feelings. This letter is a document of Bukowski's life history. I wrote to Buk telling him I thought that Neeli's book was terrible. He replied to me with this fantastic letter. It contains Bukowski's very honest review of Neeli's book. And I think the whole world should see it first hand. So here it is:

Sorry about squeezing this letter into the browser's window but I didn't want to have to make anyone scroll to the right to read the end of each line and then scroll back to the left to start back at the next line. If you've got bad eyesight and can't read this very well then print it out. It's more readable on the printed page anyway.