Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City.
A broadsheet is the largest newspaper format and is characterized by long vertical pages, typically of 22.5 inches (57 cm). Other common newspaper formats include the smaller Berliner and tabloid–compact formats.
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books that are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality, and violence. They were most popular in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, and in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems. Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach.
The San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as The Daily Dramatic Chronicle by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The paper is owned by the Hearst Corporation, which bought it from the de Young family in 2000. It is the only major daily paper covering the city and county of San Francisco.
The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.
The Oracle of the City of San Francisco, also known as the San Francisco Oracle, was an underground newspaper published in 12 issues from September 20, 1966, to February 1968 in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of that city. Allen Cohen (1940–2004), the editor during the paper's most vibrant period, and Michael Bowen, the art director, were among the founders of the publication. The Oracle was an early member of the Underground Press Syndicate.
The Los Angeles Free Press, also called "The Freep", is often cited as the first, and certainly was the largest, of the underground newspapers of the 1960s.
Jack Micheline, born Harold Martin Silver, was an American painter and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. One of San Francisco's original Beat poets, he was an innovative artist who was active in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s.
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969) is a collection of underground newspaper columns written by Charles Bukowski for the Open City newspaper that were collated and published by Essex House in 1969. His short articles were marked by his trademark crude humor, as well as his attempts to present a "truthful" or objective viewpoint of various events in his life and his own subjective responses to those events. The series is currently published by City Lights Publishing Company but can also be found in Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, which is a collection of some of Bukowski's rare and obscure works.
The media in the San Francisco Bay Area has historically focused on San Francisco but also includes two other major media centers, Oakland and San Jose. The Federal Communications Commission, Nielsen Media Research, and other similar media organizations treat the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose Area as one entire media market. The region hosts to one of the oldest radio stations in the United States still in existence, KCBS (AM) (740 kHz), founded by engineer Charles Herrold in 1909. As the home of Silicon Valley, the Bay Area is also a technologically advanced and innovative region, with many companies involved with Internet media or influential websites.
NOLA Express is a singular publication started in 1967 in New Orleans as part of the Underground Free Press movement of the 1960s that protested the Vietnam War and other government policies along with social hypocrisies. Published by two young poets, Darlene Fife and Robert Head, and produced by a dedicated band of activists, poets and illustrators based in the French Quarter, NOLA Express was opposed to American imperialism, racism and materialism. The paper was named after William S. Burroughs's cut-up novel, Nova Express, and published uncensored news, art and literature featuring Charles Bukowski, Hedwig Gorski, and many others.
Avatar was an American underground newspaper published in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1967-1968. The newspaper's first issues were published from the headquarters of Broadside magazine in Cambridge.
The Last Times was a tabloid underground newspaper published in San Francisco in 1967 by beatnik poet and printer Charles Plymell. It lasted only two issues, but included work by William Burroughs, Claude Pelieu, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski.
San Francisco Express Times was a counterculture tabloid underground newspaper edited by Marvin Garson and published weekly in San Francisco, California from January 24, 1968, to March 25, 1969, for a total of 62 issues, covering and promoting radical politics, rock music, arts and progressive culture in the Bay Area. It was a member of the Underground Press Syndicate, and sold for 15 cents.
Rebirth was a short-lived hippie underground newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona, which published nine biweekly and weekly issues between May 20, 1968, and August 1969. Published in tabloid format and featuring psychedelic graphics and underground comix, along with coverage of local and national news from a countercultural perspective, Rebirth was linked to the underground radio culture in Phoenix around radio stations KNIX, KRUX and KCAC, which were at the time offering a free-form FM progressive rock format.
Tuesday's Child was a short-lived counterculture underground newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, USA, starting on November 11, 1969. Self-described on its masthead as "An ecumenical, educational newspaper for the Los Angeles occult & underground," it was founded by Los Angeles Free Press reporter Jerry Applebaum and a group of Freep staffers, including Alex Apostolides, who left en masse after disagreements with Art Kunkin to found their own paper. It was edited by Chester Anderson and published weekly from an office in Hollywood in a tabloid format, selling for 25 cents. Never achieving the success or circulation of its crosstown rival, the Free Press, it quickly attained a degree of notoriety in and out of the underground with its coverage of the Charles Manson case. One issue featured an image of a crucified Charles Manson on the cover, and another issue had a photograph of Manson on the cover proclaiming him "Man of the Year."
John Charles Bryan was an American newspaper publisher, editor, and journalist best known for founding and running the Los Angeles alternative newspaper Open City. He also published the San Francisco-based Open City Press and the Sunday Paper. In 1981, the San Francisco Chronicle called Bryan "The King of the Underground Press." Warren Hinckle of the Chronicle called Bryan a "one-man-newspaper newspaperman," noting that his apartment was crammed with printing equipment. Paul Krassner said that Bryan was a journalist in the tradition of I.F. Stone.
Yellow Dog was an underground comix newspaper and later comic book published by the Print Mint in Berkeley, California. It published 22 issues from 1968 to 1973, featuring many of the period's most notable underground cartoonists, including Robert Crumb, Joel Beck, Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, Greg Irons, and Trina Robbins. Other frequent contributors included Andy Martin, Franz Cilensek, John Thompson, Buckwheat Florida, Jr., Jim Osborne, Ronald Lipking, and Hak Vogrin. The founding editor was Print Mint co-publisher Don Schencker.
