Fresh from being turned down by the army during the Second World War, Henry Chinaski drifts across the United States with no ambition beyond the next drink and the next paycheck he can stand to earn. Bukowski's alter ego moves from city to city and job to job, working as a shipping clerk, a stock boy, a dog-biscuit packer, and a dozen other things, quitting or getting fired almost as fast as he is hired, and treating each position with the same weary contempt.
Between shifts he drinks, gambles, chases women, and scribbles the occasional story, living in cheap rooms and cheaper bars on the margins of American life. There is no arc of redemption here, only a clear-eyed, blackly funny catalog of degradation, boredom, and small defiances, rendered in Bukowski's flat, unsparing prose.
Factotum is the second of Bukowski's Henry Chinaski novels, a semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young drunk. Bleak, crude, and mordantly comic, it stands as one of the defining works of American dirty realism and a cornerstone of Bukowski's cult reputation.
