Unmasks the tough, street-smart persona of Charles Bukowski-America's "Ultimate Outsider" * Amazing letters filled with passionate, literary, and personal observation * Insights into the author of Tales of Ordinary Madness, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and Run with the Hunted * Insights into Sheri Martinelli: the protege of Anais Nin, an accomplished painter, and the mistress of Ezra Pound Charels Bukowski's persona as the Dirty Old Man of American Literature is just that: a persona, a mask beneath which there was a man better read and more cultured than most people realize. Sheri Martinelli was one of the favored few for whom Bukowski dropped the mask and engaged in serious discussion of literature and art, and for that reason the discovery and publication of his letters to her give us a more complete picture of this complicated man.