Author Charles Bukowski’s work invites us to imagine him as a man alone (or in messy company), sharing a small apartment with a stray cat near L.A.’s Thai Town ‑ drinking and typing his life away. However, in tracing his steps as a literary tourist, it soon proves that the cantankerous scribe left his mark all over L.A.'s magnificent sprawl.

A Bukowski tour doubles as a tour of 20th century Los Angeles, through every kind of social landscape. “Buk” (a nickname among his fans, and also how he signed his drawings and sketches) would have appreciated a literary tour as he was a literary tourist himself. “Fante was my god,” he wrote on the introduction to a reissue of Ask the Dust, “…and I knew that the gods should be left alone, one didn’t bang at their door. Yet I liked to guess about where he had lived on Angels Flight and I imagined it possible that he still lived there. Almost every day I walked by and I thought, is that the window Camilla crawled through? And, is that the hotel door? Is that the lobby? I never knew.”