Linda King

Linda King is an American actress, sculptor, playwright, and poet born in 1940 in Boulder, Utah. Before establishing herself as a visual artist and writer, King worked as an actress, a career that included a Broadway appearance in 1967 in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. She has also worked as a bartender, waitress, and part-time caregiver for the elderly.

King married twice, with her first marriage lasting ten years before ending in divorce. She has two children from her earlier life and a third child from her second marriage, which also ended in divorce. During the 1970s, she edited the literary magazine Purr.

In 1970, shortly after the end of her first marriage, King met writer Charles Bukowski and proposed sculpting his likeness. He agreed, and the two entered a romantic relationship that lasted until 1975. King was 30 at the time; Bukowski was approximately 20 years her senior. The relationship was marked by volatility and physical altercations, including an incident in 1971 in which Bukowski broke her nose. The couple also stayed at the City Lights apartment in San Francisco following a reading at the City Lights Poets Theater, an occasion that ended with a broken window, a damaged door panel, and King's disappearance by morning. Bukowski attributed the damage to her. Their final split came in 1975, when King, angered by his infidelities, threw his typewriter and books into the street. That same year she relocated from Los Angeles to Phoenix, citing what she described as "one extended nervous breakdown." Bukowski drew on the relationship for his novel Women, in which the character Lydia Vance is based on King. King also wrote Bukowski's stage debut into existence, as he first performed as an actor in her play Only a Tenant, in which the two stage-read the first act at the Pasadena Museum of the Artist.

As a sculptor, King produced portrait busts in clay and bronze, including works depicting Bukowski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Micheline, Harold Norse, and A. D. Winans. She sold an edition of at least 15 bronze busts of Bukowski and, in 2009, auctioned 60 of his love letters at PBA Galleries in San Francisco. In 2004, Phoenix's Paper Heart Gallery presented her paintings, busts, and poems alongside documentary films about Bukowski in a show titled Friends and Foes of Charles Bukowski. Her play Singing Bullets was staged as part of a showcase by Phoenix's Metro Arts Institute.

King has published seven collections of poetry: Curled Inside the Curve of His Body…, I Danced With a Man Last Night, The Elephant Chronicles, Exposed, The Savageness of My Discontent, Sweet and Dirty, and The World is Not What I Thought. Her poems have appeared in publications including The Bukowski Review and Wormwood Review, and she authored the book Loving and Hating Bukowski. In September 2009, she participated in a presentation titled Tales of Bukowski & the Late 1960s LA Poetry Scene: A Reading & Report by Key Poet/Participants at Bird & Beckett Books & Records in San Francisco. That same year, she moved from Phoenix to the Sunset District of San Francisco to be closer to her grandchildren.