“In my next life I want to be a cat,” wrote the late poet Charles Bukowski. “To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.” Now a posthumously published collection of writing will see the “laureate of American lowlife” join authors from TS Eliot to Doris Lessing in chronicling his love of all things feline.

The work, acquired by publisher Canongate, will bring together Bukowski’s musings on cats. “We associate him with a kind of righteous, barfly-esque, dangerous, rock’n’roll way of life. But there is a gentleness to his writing, and a love of pets, which we’re bringing out here,” said Francis Bickmore, the publishing director of Canongate, which will publish On Cats in October. It will follow the publication of a collection of previously unpublished Bukowski letters about the art of authorship, On Writing, in July.

“Having a bunch of cats around is good,” wrote Bukowski, who died in 1994 aged 73, leaving behind six novels and more than 50 collections of poetry, letters and short stories. “If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviours. The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live for ever. It’s truly ridiculous.”

“He became sentimental about cats in his old age,” Howard Sounes, author of Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, told the Independent. “When he made a bit of money, he lived the suburban life with his wife Linda Lee and they had a lot of cats. He got a bit soppy about them.”

In his poem My Cats, included in the collection The Pleasures of the Damned, Bukowski writes of how “they complain but never/worry./they walk with a surprising dignity./they sleep with a direct simplicity that/humans just can’t/understand”, adding later: “when I am feeling/low/all I have to do is/watch my cats/and my/courage/returns.”

In The History of One Tough Motherfucker, he writes of an abused, abandoned cat he took in, and of how journalists would ask him about “life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,/shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say, ‘look, look/at this!’/but they don’t understand, they say something like, ‘you/say you’ve been influenced by Celine?’/‘no, I hold the cat up, ‘by/what happens, by things like this, by this, by this!’”

On Cats will follow July’s reissue of Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical novel Ham on Rye, and the publication of On Writing, letters from Bukowski which span his career. They move “from early letters to editors requesting work in any form, really”, said Bickmore, to his correspondence with his long-term editor John Martin. “Early on, he gets a letter from a magazine editor saying their submissions reader didn’t like his work. He writes back, saying that sounds like a good job, and that he’d like to be a submissions reader.”

Another letter, written in January 1985, lays out his response to discovering that his short story collection, Tales of Ordinary Madness, has been removed from the shelves of a Dutch library for being “very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against certain groups [including homosexuals]”.

“If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because those who I met were that. There are many ‘bads’ – bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even ‘bad’ white males. Only when you write about ‘bad’ white males they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are ‘good’ blacks, ‘good’ homosexuals and ‘good’ women?” Bukowski wrote.

“Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them, I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.” The letter ends: “may we all get better together. Hank”.

“You get a sense of an incredibly attuned mind, to the written and spoken word, who cared a great amount about what the written word could do,” said Bickmore of the unpublished letters, which were gleaned by his biographer Abel Debritto from the vast archive of material Bukowski left behind when he died. “And there’s this incredible, brilliantly indelible rage, about the idea of censorship.”

Next February, Canongate will also publish On Love, a collection of the author’s writings on relationships. “He always sought to tell the truth, whatever the cost,” said Bickmore. Describing the writer as “one of the greatest 20th-century icons that America produced”, he added that “no one talks truth to power like Charles Bukowski”.

“His fan base just seems to get bigger and bigger,” Bickmore said. “People are obsessed with him, and his iconic status seems to get more and more significant.”