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

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 fulltime 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.

[2]

Carverwho continued to smoke marijuana and experimented with cocaine at the behest

of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York Citybelieved 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, 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]

The

novelist Chuck

Kinder published Honeymooners:

Cautionary

Tale (2001), a roman 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

Chronicle named Carol

Times

Book

Sklenicka's

Review and San

unauthorized

Francisco

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

juggled writing with work. His subject matter was often focused on bluecollar 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 peopleoften 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). Carvers 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
6

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 fulltime. His later short-story collections were What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love (1981), Cathedral (1984), and Where Im 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. Carvers 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. Carvers 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 Carvers writingand even his lasting
literary reputationin the early 21st century. It was revealed that his long-time
editor, Gordon Lish, had drastically changed many of Carvers early stories. While
Lishs significant involvement in Carvers writing had long been suspected, the extent
of his editing became public knowledge when, in 2007, Carvers 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 AmericasRaymond
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 Carvers famously terse
sentences were his own, as was the hallmark bleak working-class milieu of the short
stories.