The Insider Within

Abstract

The scant surviving documentation and the half-truths told by Bukowski in interviews and in his work contribute considerably to turn this early period into a biographical and bibliographical mirage. The correspondence with Whit Burnett, Caresse Crosby, Judson Crews, J. B. May, or Anthony Linick that I recently unearthed sheds light on some previously confusing facts from the mid-1940s onward, but the information relating to the 1940–1944 period, largely based on Cherkovski’s biography and on Bukowski’s work, cannot be double-checked. No correspondence from this period has surfaced as of yet— it was probably lost or destroyed—and there are no living testimonies to attest to the veracity of Cherkovski’s and Bukowski’s assertions. It is an unverifiable, nebulous period at best.