Bread with ham

Charles Bukowski is one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, the author of more than forty books, including novels, poems, essays and short stories. Despite the sometimes shocking naturalism, his texts are full of lyricism, even a kind of sentimentality. Ham on Rye is Bukowski's most heartfelt novel. Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, it is written from the point of view of an impressionable child dealing with the duplicity, pretentiousness and vanity of the adult world. A child gradually discovering alcohol and women, gambling and fistfights, D. H. Lawrence and Hemingway, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. Bukowski did not have a childhood. He was cruelly beaten by his father, and he never experienced parental love. Therefore, it was very important for the author to create a coming-of-age novel, Ham on Rye. It is written from the perspective of an impressionable child dealing with the duplicity and vanity of the adult world.