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.
Read more about this topic: Ham On Rye
Famous quotes containing the word title:
“If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men?—if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)