Carver, Raymond
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Wikipedia-Article "Raymond Carver"
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.
Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. His father, a sawmill worker, was an alcoholic. Carver's mother worked as a waitress or as a retail clerk or else stayed home.
Carver was educated at a local school in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or Sports Afield and Outdoor Life. In 1956 at age 18, he married his high-school girlfriend, 16-year-old Maryann Burk. She was pregnant and had just graduated from an Episcopalian private school for girls. When their second child was born, she was 18 and Carver was 20. After graduating from Davis High school, Carver supported his family by working as a janitor, laborer at a sawmill and salesman. During their marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, and administrative assistant, and teacher.
Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his wife's parents had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative-writing course, and was taught by the novelist John Gardner, who had a major influence on Carver's life and career. Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt State College in California, receiving his B.A. in 1963, and later at the University of Iowa. In Palo Alto, California at Science Research Associates he worked as a textbook editor until he was fired in 1970. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at universities throughout the United States. From 1980 to 1983 he was a professor of English at Syracuse University. He published a number of short stories over his lifetime that describe blue-collar life in a number of periodicals, including The New Yorker and Esquire, which were later collected into books. His stories have been included in some of the most competitive collections in the country: Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories.
During the years of working in different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily and stated that alcohol became such a problem in his life that he more or less gave up and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a teacher in the Iowa's Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did very little teaching or writing but only drank. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Cheever went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but Carver continued drinking for some years. On June 2, 1977 Carver stopped drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In 1982 Carver divorced his first wife, Maryann. From 1979 Carver had lived with the poet Tess Gallagher whom he had met at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas. They married in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Two months later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died of lung cancer. A collection of his short fiction, Where I'm Calling From was published posthumously in 1988.
Carver was a close friend of the major writers of his era, including Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford. In 1988, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Carver's writings are often associated with minimalism. His editor at Esquire magazine, Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping Carver's prose. For example, where Gardner had advised Carver to use 15 words instead of 25, Lish instructed Carver to use 5 in place of 15. During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then poetry editor of Esquire. Carver's writing style and themes are often identified with Ernest Hemmingway, Anton Chekov and Franz Kafka, and he is often described as a "dirty realist" referring to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, and Jayne Anne Philips. These were writers who focused on the sadnesses and losses of the everyday lives of ordinary people--often lower middle class or isolated and margnialized people who represent Henry David Thoreau's idea of living lives of "quiet desperation."
Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50.
Works
Fiction
- Neighbors
- They’re Not Your Husband
- Vitamins
- Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
- So Much Water So Close to Home
- A Small, Good Thing
- Jerry and Molly and Sam
- Collectors
- Tell the Women We’re Going
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
- Furious Seasons
- Cathedral
- Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
- Elephant
- Short Cuts
Poetry
- All of Us: The Collected Poems
- A New Path to the Waterfall
- An Afternoon
- Ultramarine
- Where Water Comes Together with Other Water
- At Night the Salmon Move
- Winter Insomnia
- Near Klamath
- So Much Water So Close To Home
Collected
- Fires
- No Heroics, Please
- Call if you Need Me
- Where I'm Calling From, ISBN 0679722319
Call if you... is an updated version of No Heroics, Please. NHP, published first, featured most of Mr. Carver's uncollected works (early fiction, essays, introductions to other books, etc) as well as uncollected poems. The republished version, Call if... eliminated the poetry but added five new stories, which Gallagher and a friend of hers found among Mr. Carver's papers.
Films
- Shortcuts directed By Robert Altman
- Everything Goes directed By Andrew Kotatko