I was a young postal worker, temporarily flunked out of university, when I first read Bukowski. The Post Office of course. Aside from some postal technicalities it was less reflective of day to day in the postal world than Star Wars or Mission Impossible. I loved it and was hooked on his writing for life anyway.
He was popular among me, because when I worked in a factory doing manual labor in the 90's, his poems described the life I was living.
It was neither fringe, nor "cool", nor non-comformist, nor part of a subculture.
He was a good writer who wrote about what I was going through.
Burroughs was just fucking crazy. I liked his writing too. Not the cut-up stuff.
Exterminator!