Everything about Raymond Carver totally explained
For the darts player, see Ray Carver (darts player).
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (
May 25,
1938 –
August 2,
1988) was an
American short story writer and
poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the
short story in the 1980s.
Life
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 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 of 1957, aged 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk. She had just graduated from a private
Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December of 1957. When their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year, Carver was 20. Carver supported his family by working as a janitor, sawmill laborer, delivery man, and library assistant. During their marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, administrative assistant, and teacher.
Carver became interested in writing in
California, where he'd 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 continued his studies first at
Chico State University and then at
Humboldt State College in
Arcata, California, where he was first published and studied with Richard Cortez Day and received his B.A. in 1963. He attended the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the
University of Iowa, for one year. Maryann graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.
In the mid-60s Carver and his family lived in
Sacramento, where he worked as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He sat in on classes at what was then
Sacramento State College including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver's first book of poems,
Near Klamath, was published in 1968 by the English Club of Sacramento State College.
With his appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of
Near Klamath, and the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year. That was also the year that he moved his family to
Palo Alto, California, so that he could take a job as a textbook editor for Science Research Associates. He worked there until he was fired in 1970 for his inappropriate writing style. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at universities throughout the United States.
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 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 because of his drinking (between June of 1976 and February or March of 1977), Carver began his 'second life' and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of
Alcoholics Anonymous.
Carver met the poet
Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas in 1978. From May until August, 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles. In September, the two moved to Syracuse, 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. He married Gallagher in 1988 in
Reno,
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. He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. As his will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management of his
literary estate.
In 2001 the novelist
Chuck Kinder published
Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, a
roman à clef of his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. In 2006 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.
Writing
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 of
Where 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 [orpoem] can be written and read in one sitting." This wasn't simply a preference but, 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. The same could probably be said of the recurring theme of alcoholism and recovery.
Carver's writing style and themes are often identified with
Ernest Hemingway,
Anton Chekhov, and
Franz Kafka. Carver also referred to
Isaac Babel,
Frank O'Connor, and
V. S. Pritchett as influences. Chekhov, however, seems the greatest influence, motivating him to write
Errand, one of his final stories, about the Russian writer's final hours.
Minimalism is generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work. His editor at
Esquire magazine,
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,
Gordon Lish instructed Carver to use five in place of fifteen. Objecting to the "surgical amputation and transplantation" of Lish's editing, Carver eventually broke with him.) During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to
James Dickey, then poetry editor of
Esquire. His 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,
Tobias Wolff -- two writers Carver was closely acquainted with -- as well as
Ann Beattie 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 -- who represent
Henry David Thoreau's idea of living lives of "quiet desperation."
His first published story appeared in 1960, titled "The Furious Seasons." 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 recent collections
No Heroics, Please and
Call If You Need Me.
His first collection,
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was first published in 1976; the title story had appeared in the
Best American Short Stories 1967 collection. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year. He was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection
Cathedral, - the volume generally thought to be Carver's best. Also included in the collection are the award-winning stories "A Small Good Thing", and "Where I'm Calling From" -- a story, first printed in the New Yorker,
John Updike selected in
The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Carver said that he saw
Cathedral as a turning point in his career in its move towards a more poetic and optimistic style.
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. Only one piece of this work has survived - the unpromising fragment "The Augustine Notebooks," printed in
No Heroics, Please.
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. Prior to his death, Carver had won six O. Henry Awards for the stories "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), respectively.
Works
Fiction
Collections
Compilations
Where I'm Calling From (1988)
Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993) - (film tie-in)
Poetry
Collections
Near Klamath (1968)
Winter Insomnia (1970)
At Night The Salmon Move (1976)
Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985)
Ultramarine (1986)
A New Path To The Waterfall (1989)
Compilations
In a Marine Light: Selected Poems (1988)
All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996)
Screenplays
Dostoevsky (1985, with Tess Gallagher)
Essays, Poems, Stories (Uncollected Works)
Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1983)
No Heroics, Please (1999)
Call if You Need Me (2000)
These books gather otherwise uncollected works. Fires covers Carver's career during the period 1966–82. The latter volumes were published posthumously, and include early fiction, essays, and reviews of other authors. Call if You Need Me was identical to No Heroics, Please apart from the replacement of poetry in the latter with new stories, two found in Carver's desk by his last partner, Tess Gallagher and three found in his archives by scholar William Stull.
Films
Short Cuts directed by Robert Altman
Everything Goes directed by Andrew Kotatko
Jindabyne (based on So Much Water So Close to Home) directed by Ray Lawrence
What's in Alaska? directed by Jim Fields
Music
The 1989 album So Much Water So Close to Home by Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, includes a track Everything's Turning to White which is a re-telling of Carver's story So Much Water So Close to Home
Books and Articles about Carver
Further Information
Get more info on 'Raymond Carver'.
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