Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story

in literature during the 1980s. Early life[edit]

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up

in Yakima, Washington, the son of Elta Beatrice (Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. [1]His father,

a skilled sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and heavy drinker. Carver's mother

worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one brother, James Franklin Carver, was

born in 1943.

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time, he read mostly

novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and

fished with friends and family. After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked

with his father at a sawmill in California. In June 1957, aged 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann

Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine

La Rae, was born in December 1957. When their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was

born the next year, Carver was 20. He supported his family by working as a delivery man, janitor,

library assistant, and sawmill laborer. During their marriage, Maryann also supported the family

by working as an administrative assistant and a high school English teacher, salesperson, and

waitress.[2]

Writing career[edit]

Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because

his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative writing course taught by

the novelist John Gardner, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and

career. Carver's first published story, "The Furious Seasons", appeared in 1961. More florid than

his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious Seasons" was

later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and can now be found in

the recent collections, No Heroics, Please[3] and Call If You Need Me.[4]

Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt State

College in Arcata, California, where he studied with Richard Cortez Day and received his B.A. in

1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the university

literary magazine, in which he published several of his own pieces under pseudonyms. He

attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop during the 1963-1964 academic year; homesick for

California and unable to fully acclimate to the program's upper middle class milieu, he completed

twelve credits out of the thirty required for a M.A. degree. Carver was awarded a fellowship for a

second year of study from program director Paul Engle, after Maryann Carver personally

interceded and compared her husband's plight to Tennessee Williams' deleterious experience in

the program three decades earlier. Carver nonetheless elected to leave the program at the end of

the semester. Maryann— who postponed completing her education to support her husband's

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educational and literary endeavors —eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970

and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.

In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, California, where he briefly worked

at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He did all of the

janitorial work in the first hour and then wrote at the hospital through the rest of the night. He sat

in on classes at what was then Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis

Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver's first book of poems, Near

Klamath, was later written and published under Schmitz's guidance.

With the appearance of "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" in Martha Foley's annual Best

American Short Stories anthology and the impending publication of Near Klamath by the English

Club of Sacramento State College, 1967 was a landmark year for Carver. He briefly enrolled in

the library science graduate program at the University of Iowa that summer but returned to

California following the death of his father. Shortly thereafter, the Carvers relocated to Palo Alto,

California, so he could take his first white-collar job at Science Research Associates (a subsidiary

of IBM), where he worked intermittently as a textbook editor and public relations director through

1970. Following a 1968 sojourn toIsrael, the Carvers relocated to San Jose, California; as

Maryann finished her undergraduate degree, he would remain enrolled in the library science

program at San Jose State through the end of 1969, failing once again to take a degree.

Nevertheless, he established vital literary connections with Gordon Lish and the

poet/publisher George Hitchcockduring this period.

After the publication of "Neighbors" in the June 1971 issue of Esquire at the instigation of Lish

(now ensconced as the magazine's fiction editor), Carver (by now a resident ofSunnyvale,

California) began to teach as a visiting artist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He

received a Stegner Fellowship to study in the non-degree graduate creative writing program

at Stanford University during the 1972-1973 term, where he cultivated friendships with

contemporaneous fellows Chuck Kinder, Max Crawford, and William Kittredge. The fellowship

enabled the Carvers to buy a house in Cupertino, California; in addition to his position at Santa

Cruz, he took on another teaching job at the University of California, Berkeley that year.

His first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976. The

collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000

copies that year.[citation needed]

During his years of working different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started to

drink heavily.[2] By his own admission, eventually he more or less gave up writing and took to full-

time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers'

Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and

almost no writing. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Cheever went to a treatment center to

attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but Carver continued drinking for three years. After being

hospitalized three times (between June 1976 and February or March 1977), Carver began his

"second life" and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

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[2] Carver—who continued to smoke marijuana and experimented with cocaine at the behest

of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City—believed he would have died of

alcoholism at the age of 40 if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking.[5]

Carver was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection, Cathedral, the volume

generally perceived as his best. Included in the collection are the award-winning stories "A Small,

Good Thing", and "Where I'm Calling From". John Updike selected the latter for inclusion in The

Best American Short Stories of the Century. For his part, Carver saw Cathedral as a watershed in

his career, in its shift towards a more optimistic and confidently poetic style.[6]

Personal life and death[edit]

Decline of first marriage[edit]

The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll's review [7] of Maryann Burk Carver's 2006

memoir[8] describes the decline of Maryann and Raymond's marriage.

The fall began with Ray's trip to Missoula, Mont., in '72 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge's birthday party. "That's when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt the children. It changed everything.""By fall of '74", writes Carver, "he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the Ph.D. program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes". Over the next several years, Maryann's husband physically abused her. Friends urged her to leave Raymond."But I couldn't. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I'd do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last and always."Carver describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of '78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. "It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving." So he wrote a letter instead."I thought, I've gone through all those years fighting to keep it all balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never fell out of love with him."

Second marriage[edit]

Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in Dallas,

Texas, in November 1977. Beginning in January, 1979, Carver and

Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas; in a borrowed cabin near Port

Angeles, Washington; and in Tucson, Arizona. In 1980, the two moved

to Syracuse, New York, where Gallagher had been appointed the

coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University; Carver

taught as a professor in the English department. He and Gallagher jointly

purchased a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. In ensuing years,

the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that

read "Writers At Work" in order to be left alone. In 1982, Carver and first

wife, Maryann, were divorced.[9] He married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno,

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Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles,

Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was

inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[citation needed]

In December 2006, Gallagher published an essay in The Sun magazine,

titled "Instead of Dying", about alcoholism and Carver's having maintained

his sobriety.[10] The essay is an adaptation of a talk she initially delivered at

the Welsh Academy's Academi Intoxication Conference in 2006. The first

lines read: "Instead of dying from alcohol, Raymond Carver chose to live. I

would meet him five months after this choice, so I never knew the Ray who

drank, except by report and through the characters and actions of his stories

and poems."[11]

Death[edit]

On August 2, 1988, Carver died from lung cancer at the age of 50. He is

buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles. The inscription on his

tombstone reads:

:LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

His poem "Gravy" is also inscribed.

As Carver's will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management of

his literary estate.[2]

Memorials[edit]

In Carver's birth town of Clatskanie, Oregon, a memorial park and statue

were constructed in the late 2000s spearheaded by the local Friends of the

Library, using mostly local donations. Tess Gallagher was present at the

dedication. It is located in the old town on the corner of Lillich and Nehalem

Streets, across from the library. A block away, the building where Raymond

Carver was born still stands. There is a plaque of Carver in the foyer.[citation needed]

Legacy and posthumous publications[edit]

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The novelist Chuck Kinder published Honeymooners: A Cautionary

Tale (2001), a roman à clef about his friendship with Carver in the 1970s.

Carver's high school sweetheart[12] and first wife, Maryann Burk Carver, wrote

a memoir of her years with Carver, What it Used to be Like: A Portrait of My

Marriage to Raymond Carver (2006).

The New York Times Book Review and San Francisco

Chronicle named Carol Sklenicka's unauthorized biography, Raymond

Carver: A Writer's Life (2009), published by Scribner, one of the Best Ten

Books of that year;[12][13] and the San Francisco Chronicle deemed it:

"exhaustively researched and definitive biography". Carver's widow, Tess

Gallagher, refused to engage with Sklenica.[14]

His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled Elephant in Britain

(included in "Where I'm Calling From") was composed in the five years

before his death. The nature of these stories, especially "Errand", have led to

some speculation that Carver was preparing to write a novel. [citation needed] Only

one piece of this work has survived - the fragment "The Augustine

Notebooks", first printed in No Heroics, Please.[citation needed]

Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories posthumously in Call If You

Need Me; one of the stories ("Kindling") won an O. Henry Award in 1999.[citation

needed] In his lifetime Carver won five O. Henry Awards; these winning stories

were "Are These Actual Miles" (originally titled "What is it?") (1972), "Put

Yourself in My Shoes" (1974), "Are You A Doctor?" (1975), "A Small, Good

Thing" (1983), and "Errand" (1988).[citation needed]

Tess Gallagher fought with Knopf for permission to republish the stories

in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as they were originally

written by Carver, as opposed to the heavily edited and altered versions that

appeared in 1981 under the editorship of Gordon Lish. [15][16] The book,

entitled Beginners,[17] was released in hardback on October 1, 2009 in Great

Britain,[18] followed by its U.S. publication in the Library of America edition that

collected all of Carver's short fiction in a single volume.[19]

Literary characteristics[edit]

Carver's career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He described

himself as "inclined toward brevity and intensity" and "hooked on writing

short stories" (in the foreword ofWhere I'm Calling From, a collection

published in 1988 and a recipient of an honorable mention in the 2006 New

York Times article citing the best works of fiction of the previous 25 years).

Another stated reason for his brevity was "that the story [or poem] can be

written and read in one sitting." This was not simply a preference but,

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particularly at the beginning of his career, a practical consideration as he

juggled writing with work. His subject matter was often focused on blue-

collar experience, and was clearly reflective of his own life.[citation needed]

Characteristics of minimalism are generally seen as one of the hallmarks of

Carver's work, although, as reviewer David Wiegand notes:[14]

"Carver never thought of himself as a minimalist or in any category,

for that matter."

"'He rejected categories generally,' Sklenicka says. 'I don't think he

had an abstract mind at all. He just wasn't built that way, which is

why he's so good at picking the right details that will stand for many

things.'"

Carver's editor at Esquire, Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping

Carver's prose in this direction - where his earlier tutor John Gardner had

advised Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five, Lish instructed

Carver to use five in place of fifteen. Objecting to the "surgical amputation

and transplantation" of Lish's heavy editing, Carver eventually broke with

him.[20] During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then

poetry editor of Esquire.

Carver's style has also been described as dirty realism, which connected him

with a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard

Ford and Tobias Wolff (two writers with whom Carver was closely

acquainted), as well as others such as Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme,

and Jayne Anne Phillips. With the exception of Beattie, who wrote about

upper-middle-class people, these were writers who focused on sadness and

loss in the everyday lives of ordinary people—often lower-middle class or

isolated and marginalized people.[citation needed]

Raymond Carver, in full Raymond Clevie Carver   (born May 25, 1938, Clatskanie,

Ore., U.S.—died Aug. 2, 1988, Port Angeles, Wash.), American short-story writer and

poet whose realistic writings about the working poor mirrored his own life.

Carver was the son of a sawmill worker. He married a year after finishing high school

and supported his wife and two children by working as a janitor, gas-station

attendant, and delivery man. He became seriously interested in a writing career after

taking a creative-writing course at Chico State College (now California State

University, Chico) in 1958. His short stories began to appear in magazines while he

studied at Humboldt State College (now Humboldt State University) in Arcata, Calif.

(B.A., 1963). Carver’s first success as a writer came in 1967 with the story “Will You

Please Be Quiet, Please?,” and he began writing full-time after losing his job as a

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textbook editor in 1970. The highly successful short-story collection Will You Please

Be Quiet, Please? (1976) established his reputation.

Carver began drinking heavily in 1967 and was repeatedly hospitalized

foralcoholism in the 1970s, while continuing to turn out short stories. After conquering

his drinking problem in the late 1970s, he taught for several years at the University of

Texas at El Paso and at Syracuse University, and in 1983 he won a literary award

whose generous annual stipend freed him to again concentrate on his writing full-

time. His later short-story collections were What We Talk About When We Talk About

Love (1981), Cathedral (1984), and Where I’m Calling From(1988). While his short

stories were what made his critical reputation, he was also an accomplished poet in

the realist tradition of Robert Frost. Carver’s poetrycollections include At Night the

Salmon Move (1976), Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985),

and Ultramarine (1986). He died of lung cancerat age 50.

In his short stories Carver chronicled the everyday lives and problems of the working

poor in the Pacific Northwest. His blue-collar characters are crushed by broken

marriages, financial problems, and failed careers, but they are often unable to

understand or even articulate their own anguish. Carver’s stripped-down, minimalist

prose style is remarkable for its honesty and power. He is credited with helping

revitalize the genre of the English-language short story in the late 20th century.

However, controversy arose over the nature of Carver’s writing—and even his lasting

literary reputation—in the early 21st century. It was revealed that his long-time

editor, Gordon Lish, had drastically changed many of Carver’s early stories. While

Lish’s significant involvement in Carver’s writing had long been suspected, the extent

of his editing became public knowledge when, in 2007, Carver’s widow, the

poet Tess Gallagher, announced that she was seeking to publish the original

versions of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (which

appeared as Beginners in the U.K. and also as part of the Library of

America’sRaymond Carver: Collected Stories [both 2009]). Lish was shown to have

changed characters’ names, cut the length of many stories (over 75 percent of the

text in two cases), and altered the endings of some stories. However, most of

Carver’s famously terse sentences were his own, as was the hallmark bleak working-

class milieu of the short stories.

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