“I kept writing not because I felt I was so good,” he wrote in a 1972 letter to David Evanier, “but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.”

Shakespeare is just one canonical author to get smacked by Bukowski in these pages. Though he rails against the rules when it comes to his work being dismissed, he is quick to lay down his mandates. The only true artist is “a pure Artist saying it properly out of pain and madness and truth,” preferably from a flophouse, surrounded by the salt of the earth, cheap women and cheaper wine. Frequent visits to the racetrack recommended. Particular ire is directed, not surprisingly, at contemporaries and movements that achieved the fame he alternately disdained, yearned for and worried about.

Writing to Edward van Aelstyn in 1963, he describes the Black Mountain poets as “some precious group with staff and walking shorts gathered upon a North Carolina mountaintop.” In 1967, in another letter to Norse, he remarks about Issue 50 of the literary journal Evergreen Review that “the thing is shot through with the famous,” but “the writing is all bad, except mine and a really good play by Heathcote Williams.” In 1969, while submitting work to Paloma Picasso, he remarks that William S. Burroughs’s “cutups and tape arrangements are just ghetto bored flip of a safe and secure man.”

Because Bukowski had beefs with just about everyone, I found myself alternately chuckling and rolling my eyes (sometimes both) as the hits kept coming. Yet the overall effect is wearying, and it’s difficult not to feel increasingly ungenerous toward Bukowski’s litany of laments, complaints and rages, particularly as the references to “black homos,” “pansies,” “whores” and the like stack up.

And yet it’s hard, also, not to feel a certain sympathy toward Bukowski, at least as far as concerns his blamelessness for the structure of “On Writing,” which stacks the deck against him. Few artists are at their most thoughtful or generous when discussing the waters in which they must swim to further their careers, especially when kvetching with friends and railing against gatekeepers. The correspondence in this book has been first selected because it fits a theme, and then edited so that only the parts of each letter that relate to this theme are included, with missing material indicated by “[...].”