I did A-Level English Lit and considered doing it as degree then decided on something else, but still I was a literary teenager and I read A LOT OF BOOKS...by end of university I was mostly reading US lit
First shared house I lived in when I worked in London was very large with a basement and a UCL student who lived down there left a copy of "Women" in the shared kitchen, so I started reading it, found it addictive...
Read the most of the rest over many years in London, always reading on Tube or Trains had probably read +1000 books by age 35. At that time I finally read "Ham-on-Rye" the most auto-biographical of the novels and was blown away, a lot of identification with my own childhood & adolescence, so went back read it all in chronological order
He admired Hemingway but said "there was not a lot of laughs there" so developed a similar style based on simplicity with added "force and humor". It is based on his life but written as fiction via his alter ego "Henry Chinaski", a perpetual outsider, and is considered "cult fiction" and not taught in many US Literature departments
Have you read any of it, or just know the name from the film?