Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, it's most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirtyfive.He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.