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.
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He wrote the 2000 best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Eggers is also the founder of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a literary journal; a co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness; and the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in several magazines.
Russell Claude Smith is a Canadian writer and newspaper columnist. Smith's novels and short stories are mostly set in Toronto, where he lives.
Paul Krassner was an American author, journalist, and comedian. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining. He died on July 21, 2019, in Desert Hot Springs, California.
David Rowland Langford is a British author, editor, and critic, largely active within the science fiction field. He publishes the science fiction fanzine and newsletter Ansible, and holds the all-time record for most Hugo Awards, with a total of 29 wins.
New York Press was a free alternative weekly in New York City, which was published from 1988 to 2011.
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. The Freep was founded in 1964 by Art Kunkin, who served as its publisher until 1971 and continued on as its editor-in-chief through June 1973. The paper closed in 1978. It was unsuccessfully revived a number of times afterward.
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.
Mike Edison is a New York-based writer, editor, musician, social critic, and spoken word artist. He was one of many publishers/editors of the marijuana counterculture magazine High Times, and was later named editor-in-chief of Screw, the self-proclaimed "World's Greatest Newspaper." In his memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, Edison recounts his adventures across twenty years of druggy adventurism and his parallel careers as a magazine editor, writer, and musician. His other books include the sprawling history of American men's magazines, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, An American Tale of Sex and Wonder; the political satire Bye, Bye Miss American Pie; several collaborations including Restaurant Man with Joe Bastianich and The Carnivore's Manifesto with Slow Food USA founder Patrick Martins; and most recently, Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters, a history and appreciation of the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, and the history of blues and rock ’n ’roll drumming. Edison speaks frequently on free speech, and the American counterculture. Between 2011 and 2018, Edison was the host and producer of the weekly Heritage Radio Network series Arts & Seizures.
Frederick Theodore Rall III is an American columnist, syndicated editorial cartoonist, and author. His political cartoons often appear in a multi-panel comic-strip format and frequently blend comic-strip and editorial-cartoon conventions. The cartoons used to appear in approximately 100 newspapers around the United States. He was president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists from 2008 to 2009.
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 Booze News is a satirical newspaper founded at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in February 2004 by Atish Doshi and Derek Chin. The free paper, published weekly with a circulation of 20,000, is written, edited and distributed by students at UIUC. Currently, The Booze News is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and continues to exist under The Black Sheep.
NOLA Express is a publication started in 1967 in New Orleans by the young poets Darlene Fife and Robert Head. Part the underground free press movement of the 1960s, the paper was opposed to American imperialism, racism and materialism. It protested the Vietnam War and other government policies, along with social hypocrisies.
Joseph Perez is an American writer in the fields of spirituality and Integral theory.
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.
Open City was a weekly underground newspaper published in Los Angeles by avant-garde journalist John Bryan from May 6, 1967 to April 1969. It was noted for its coverage of radical politics, rock music, psychedelic culture and the "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column by Charles Bukowski.
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.
Portions From a Wine-Stained Notebook is written by Charles Bukowski, edited by David Stephen Calonne, and published by City Lights.
David Stephen Calonne is an American writer and scholar of the Beat Generation and Charles Bukowski. He was born in Los Angeles, where he attended the University of California.
Jack Stevenson is an author and film showman, who lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.
