Linda King

Linda King (born 1940) is an American sculptor and poet. She was the girlfriend of American writer Charles Bukowski for several years in the early 1970s.

Linda King is a poet, playwright, and artist working in painting and sculpture who was immortalized in the poetry and prose of her former love Charles Bukowski. During the 1970s, King edited the little magazine, Purr.

Born in 1940, she was brought up in Boulder, Utah. She was divorced after a marriage for ten years to an Italian with a traditional outlook. They had two children, a boy and a girl. She was an actress before she become a sculptor and poet. If Bukowski's autobiographical writings are to be believed, King had a large ego and a flair for self-dramatization.

In 1970, shortly after the end of her marriage, she met Charles Bukowski, danced for him, and offered to make a sculpture of his head. He accepted her offer, and they soon had an affair. (The couple frequently broke up, and when they were parted, Bukowski would give her back the bust of him she had sculpted.)

She was 30 and Bukowski was 20 years her senior when they started their relationship. Their relationship was passionate and turbulent; on one occasion in 1971, Bukowski broke her nose in an argument. One night, King and Bukowski were accommodated in the City Lights apartment in San Francisco, after a reading at the City Lights Poets Theater. By the morning there was a broken window and a panel smashed in the door, and King had disappeared; Bukowski blamed her for the damage.

They split up after three years, when one night King threw his typewriter and books onto the street in a drunken spree, angry at his infidelities. The incident is detailed in Bukowski's novel, Women, whose leading character, Lydia Vance, is based on King.

Critic Robert Peters viewed Bukowski first stage debut the poet as actor in Linda King’s play Only a Tenant in which she and Bukowski staged read the first act at the Pasadena Museum of the Artist. Their relationship was on-off; in 1975 she finally left him and Los Angeles for Phoenix, because of what she described as "one extended nervous breakdown".

She said of their relationship:

It wasn't that he had other women. It's that he always wanted me to know about them, always wanted to tell me all the details about what they did together. Who does that unless they really want to make you mad?

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