Monday marked the 32^nd anniversary of the passing of Charles Bukowski from leukemia at age 73. Considering the life he lived, it is remarkable he lived as long as he did. Bukowski, whose rough but strangely captivating visage was best described by Paul Ciotti as “a sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids and a dominating nose that looks as if it was assembled in a junkyard,” was an author who defined outsider American literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike his wholesome contemporaries, Ray Bradbury and E. B. White, Bukowski was a notorious womanizer with an aura of stale aftershave, Chesterfield cigarettes, and cheap wine.

Bukowski was a poet of considerable genius whose influence stretches from Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain to Hubert Selby Jr. and Chuck Palahniuk. His finest poems, like “Bluebird,” are steeped in whisky-soaked melancholy. Though he chronicled the bars, brothels, and shadowy hours of Los Angeles, he was still capable of sudden, startling beauty.

Today, Bukowski would probably struggle to get published. The new generation of literary gatekeepers would be inclined to reject his work outright. A major study of the American publishing industry found that women hold 74 percent of editorial roles, 78 percent of literary agent positions, and 71 percent of publishing jobs overall. Six of 10 executive-level positions in publishing are held by women. This chromosomal cartel has fostered a monoculture, leaving young male writers increasingly sidelined in an industry that often demonizes masculinity.

Few who enter the profession are poor Americans who grew up in the Rust Belt, but instead are mostly young white women, often from privileged backgrounds. While they may be intelligent and ambitious, publishing has long relied on unpaid internships that are accessible mainly to the affluent. This creates barriers to entry for those without generational wealth or a high-earning partner, as entry-level jobs (and often even more senior roles) tend to pay subsistence wages. New hires tend to be graduates of elite liberal arts colleges with degrees in English or creative writing.

For Bukowski, a writer’s real education came not from academia’s ivory towers, but from living “in the raw.” In Ham on Rye, his 1982 semi-autobiographical novel, he called the campus “a place to hide” where professors “crammed you with theory” and never told students “how hard the pavements were.” In an interview with The New York Quarterly, he summed up his anti-academic stance: aspiring poets should “stay the hell out of writing classes and find out what’s happening around the corner.”

Throughout his life, Bukowski worked a series of low-paying menial jobs—pickle factory, slaughterhouse, dog biscuit factory, truck driver, gas station attendant, and stock boy at Sears-Roebuck. He eventually secured steady work as a mailman for the U.S. Postal Service, a job he held for 14 years. During this time, he penned the column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” for the LA Free Press. After Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin offered him $100 a month to write full-time, Bukowski quit in 1970. He captured the drudgery and repetition of the daily grind in his first novel, Post Office, which he wrote at the age of 49.

Chuck Palahniuk takes a similar blue-collar approach. In Consider This—a mix of memoir and practical advice—he argues that most writing programs produce generic standardized voices. Chasing a degree, he says, strips away the uniqueness that connects writers to readers. Craft, for Palahniuk, is honed through repetition, much like any trade.

Were he alive today, Bukowski would have little respect for modern writers lounging in Starbucks, flashing their new laptops as they stare at blank screens over $10 lattes. He didn’t seek validation and hated crowds, calling them inauthentic. “I dislike real people … I hate them,” he wrote in Factotum. Secluded in his rundown apartment, he typed into the early hours, cigarette ash constantly falling onto his old Underwood typewriter. Despite, perhaps even because of his heavy drinking, he was productive, publishing six novels and at least 19 poetry collections in his lifetime. Since his death, roughly 60 volumes of his poetry and prose have been published.

Bukowski did not live to see the insidious rise of censorship strangling creativity in literature. For the laureate of American lowlife, writing should come from the heart and the gut—words bursting onto the page, not redlined by the censorious glare of sensitivity readers, fiction’s new moral guardian. Perhaps he was the last of his kind: a voice unafraid, burning bright against the darkening page.                        

Writing a tribute to Bukowski is fraught with contradictions. I own 30 of his books, poetry collections, and story anthologies, yet I hesitate to call him a literary hero. He loathed idolatry, detested sycophants and groupies at his readings, but above all, he despised mediocrity. “If you write dull shit, it doesn’t matter what you die from.”