Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, a book by Howard Sounes

Howard Sounes

Howard Sounes is a British author, journalist and biographer.Howard Sounes began his career as a newspaper journalist as a staff reporter for the Sunday Mirror. He broke major stories concerning one of the most notorious murder cases in British criminal history, that of Fred West and Rosemary West...

, published in 1998 by Grove Press

Grove Press

Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...

, is a biography

Biography

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

 of American writer Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...

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Although he did not know Bukowski personally--he never met him in fact--Sounes wished to find the characters Bukowski wrote about in his poems and novels. Sounes doesn't shy away from the fact that Bukowski had written some terrible things in his life.

The book contains several of Bukowski's own drawings. The title comes from Bukowski's poem "One For The Shoeshine Man".