Russell Harrison

Softcover, 328 pages ISBN 0-87685-959-7 1994 $18.95   Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski by Russell Harrison Charles Bukowski (1920–1994), poet laureate of the drunk and downtrodden, was an authentic folk-genius of the American vernacular. For Russell Harrison, he was also a “social lyricist”—a proletarian poet who saw life-on-the-job in the United States as deadening, demoralizing, yet also the stuff of art. In this collection of essays on Bukowski's poetry and fiction, Harrison is at his most original when tracing influences on the artist’s work (from the Surrealists to Jackie Gleason) and when offering us Buk as the anti-Ben Franklin (that is, as the man who defined success as refusing the American Dream).   “It’s a funny book because Bukowski was funny . . . It gets my vote.” —Beat Scene Contents: Introduction The Poetry: 1. Poetry and Class 2. The Individual and the Social 3. Poetry and the Working Class 4. Metonymy 5. Excursus: Brecht The Fiction: 6. Work, Refusal of Work, and the Job 7. Excursus: Miller 8. Sex, Women, and Irony 9. Connections: Fante — Hamsun — Mahler 10. Excursus: Gleason 11. The Fascination of the Ordinary Notes, Bibliography, Index Russell Harrison (b. 1944) is an associate professor of American literature at Hofstra University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.