Bukowski Quit the Post Office at 49
Quick answer: Charles Bukowski quit his post office job at 49 for a hundred dollars a month, then wrote his first novel in about three weeks. The great late starter story.
At the end of 1969, a forty-nine-year-old mail clerk in Los Angeles resigned from the United States Postal Service, where he had sorted and carried letters, on and off, for the better part of fifteen years. The pension was gone, his body was wrecked by the night shifts, and his entire safety net was an offer from a small publisher named John Martin: one hundred dollars a month, for life, to do nothing but write. Charles Bukowski took the deal, sat down, and by most accounts finished his first novel, Post Office, in around three weeks.
Almost everything about that paragraph runs against the standard advice given to writers. He started too late, drank too much, had no degree, no agent, no plan B and no savings. He also had thirty years of material, a completely formed voice, and a publisher who believed in him with actual money. The late start was not wasted time. It was the inventory.
The decade he did not write
Bukowski's beginning was early and false. Born in 1920 and raised in Los Angeles under a violent father, he placed a short story, 'Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip', in the prestigious Story magazine in 1944, at twenty-four, with another piece in Portfolio soon after. Then, discouraged by rejections and drawn harder to the bottle than the desk, he essentially stopped submitting for roughly a decade, drifting through rooming houses, menial jobs and cities, a stretch he later called his ten-year drunk.
The stretch nearly killed him. In 1955 he was taken to the charity ward of an LA hospital with a bleeding ulcer, an episode widely reported to have brought him close to death. When he came out, something had shifted: he began writing poems in volume and sending them to the small magazines. Whatever the hospital took from him, it appears to have returned his nerve.
Poems by night, mail by day
For the next decade and a half his life ran on a double shift. Days and nights went to the post office, first as a carrier and later as a sorting clerk on punishing night schedules. The remaining hours went to poems, hundreds of them, typed with beer at hand and mailed to the mimeographed little magazines that formed the underground of American poetry in the late 1950s and 1960s. His first chapbook, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, appeared in 1960 from a tiny press.
The small-press world paid in copies and postage stamps, but it did what big publishing could not: it read him. Editors like Jon and Louise Webb of The Outsider championed his work and hand-printed gorgeous editions of his early collections. In 1967 his newspaper column 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man' in the LA underground weekly Open City widened his audience far beyond poetry readers. By his late forties, Bukowski was simultaneously a complete unknown to mainstream literature and a cult figure with a real, countable readership.
One hundred dollars a month, for life
The turn has a name and an address. John Martin, a Los Angeles office-supply manager and book collector, was convinced Bukowski was a major writer and founded Black Sparrow Press substantially to publish him. His offer is one of the most retold deals in modern letters: a guaranteed hundred dollars a month for life, in exchange for Bukowski leaving the post office and writing full time. It was a real risk on both sides; Martin funded it from his salary, and Bukowski, at forty-nine, was gambling a federal job on a micro-press.
Bukowski later put the choice in characteristically blunt terms, saying in effect that he could stay and go mad, or leave and starve, and that he chose starving. Weeks after quitting, Post Office existed: short, brutal, very funny, and built entirely out of the day job he had just escaped. Black Sparrow published it in February 1971. It went on to sell steadily for decades and has been translated across the world, and Bukowski stayed loyal to Martin's press essentially for life, one of publishing's stranger and more touching marriages.
Was it really that simple? No
Honesty requires a few asterisks. The hundred dollars was survival money even in 1970, and the early Black Sparrow years were thin; fame arrived gradually through the 1970s and properly only in the 1980s, helped by European readers and the 1987 film Barfly, when Bukowski was in his sixties. The three-week novel was possible because he had already served a twenty-year apprenticeship in the small magazines; the speed was fluency, not magic.
It also matters that luck gets its honest billing here. A publisher willing to fund a writer for life is not a plan anyone can replicate on demand. What Bukowski controlled was everything before the luck: the enormous body of published poems, the column, the cult readership that made Martin's bet rational. He was findable. When the one improbable reader arrived, there were fifteen years of work sitting in plain sight to be found.
What a late starter can take from this
First, the clock argument collapses on inspection. Bukowski's first novel came at fifty, and the decades before it were not lost years but raw stock; nothing teaches a writer like a life actually lived, including the bad jobs. If you are starting at forty or sixty, your disadvantage against the twenty-five-year-old is a shorter runway, and your advantage is a fuller warehouse. He would have had nothing to write Post Office about at twenty-five.
Second, volume in small venues beats silence aimed at big ones. Bukowski built his entire escape route out of little magazines that most ambitious writers considered beneath them. Every published poem was a small public fact accumulating toward the moment someone with resources took notice. The lesson transfers directly: keep finished work constantly in front of readers who respond, whether that is journals, open mics, or a monthly contest that scores every single entry, so that when your John Martin comes looking, there is a trail to find.
Where to start reading Bukowski
Post Office (1971) remains the cleanest entry point: a working life turned into fiction with no self-pity and startling economy. Among the poetry, the Black Sparrow collections from the 1970s, such as Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, show what his flat, spoken line can do with grief and humour in the same breath. His gravestone reads 'Don't try', which admirers gloss, via his letters, not as surrender but as advice against forcing the work: if it doesn't come naturally from lived material, wait until it does. Read him for the voice, and watch how much craft hides inside writing that pretends to have none.
What poets can take from this
- Count your years of ordinary life as inventory, not delay; the day job is material.
- Publish where you can be read now instead of waiting for the venue that ignores you.
- Build a public trail of finished work so that one well-placed believer can find and fund you.
- When your break arrives, move fast; Bukowski turned freedom into a finished novel within weeks.
- Loyalty can be strategy: a small publisher who bets on you may serve you better than a large one who tolerates you.
- Write the truth of your own hours; nobody else clocked your shift.
Try it yourself
Write a poem set in the final hour of the last shift of a job you are leaving forever, ending on the first thing you notice outside the door.
Questions
How long did Bukowski work at the post office?
On and off for around fifteen years, first as a mail carrier in the 1950s and later as a night-shift sorting clerk, until he resigned at the end of 1969 at the age of forty-nine. The job became the raw material for his first novel, Post Office.
Did Bukowski really write Post Office in three weeks?
It is widely reported that he finished the first draft in about three weeks, and Bukowski himself gave figures in that range. The speed reflected long preparation: he had spent some two decades writing constantly for small magazines, so the voice and the material were fully formed before he began.
How old was Bukowski when he became successful?
He published his first novel at fifty, but mainstream success came later, building through the 1970s and peaking in the 1980s, helped by European sales and the 1987 film Barfly, which he scripted. He is a standard example of a writer whose major career began at an age when most people are told it is too late.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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