Charles Bukowski's Lost Contribution to Richard Lazarus’ Stress and Coping Theory

Poet and novelist Charles Bukowski had an unsung role in turning Richard Lazarus’s stress and coping theory into some highly cited papers.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) Photo by Thomas Cizauskas flickr

I drew on Charles Bukowski’s Shoelace poem for a hypothesis that organized analyses of some unruly data. My colleagues and I turned the data into my most cited paper ever, plus another paper cited over 2500 times.

Warning: Today, you probably cannot do what we did, at least not in the way we did it decades ago. You can watch the past but not rewind and live in it.

I was lucky to find an actual performance of Bukowski’s reciting of the poem on YouTube as evidence for what I will be saying. I listened to the poem repeatedly on a fateful night decades ago and a great inspiration came to me…