Title
The title may be a play on J. D. Salinger's 1951 book The Catcher in the Rye, which is one of the most notable coming-of-age novels about American males. Both Bukowski and Salinger were first published professionally in 1940s in the literary magazine Story, edited by Whit Burnett. However, Bukowski's admiration of John Fante suggests that a phrase in Fante's Ask the Dust, "liverwurst on rye," may have inspired the title "Ham on Rye."
Yet a third possibility is that the title is a dig at the New York literary critics who generally disdained Bukowski's work, scoring him as the equivalent of a ham actor with an overwrought, amateurish style. Thus, Bukowski may be appropriating the knock and boldly declaring himself a ham writer fueled by rye whiskey.
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