Raymond Carver - Life, Writing, Works

Poet and short-story writer, born in Clatskanie, Oregon, USA. He taught at the universities of Iowa, Texas, and California. His collections include Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), and Cathedral (1983). In a Marine Light: Selected Poems appeared in the year he died.

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.

Life

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

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. After graduating from Davis High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California.

Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his wife's mother had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative-writing course, taught by the novelist John Gardner, who had a major influence on Carver's life and career.

In the mid-60s Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, where he worked as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. 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 time 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.

In 1982 Carver divorced his first wife, Maryann.

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 [or poem] can be written and read in one sitting".

Carver's writing style and themes are often identified with Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, and Franz Kafka.

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, Lish instructed Carver to use five in place of fifteen. His style has also been described as Dirty realism, referring to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff - two writers Carver was closely acquainted with - Ann Beattie, and Jayne Anne Phillips.

His first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was first published in 1976, and the title story was selected for the America's Best Short Stories collection. However, it was the title story of this collection, about a man meeting with a blind, old acquaintance of his wife, which Carver pointed to as a turning point in his career, as a "different kind" of story to his earlier work, more literary and perhaps more optimistic, though bittersweet, in tone.

His final collection of seven stories, Elephant, was composed shortly before his death. The nature of these stories, especially Errand, have led to some speculation that Carver may have been preparing to write his first novel (other attempts to write longer work had been abandoned, most notably a rather uneven and unpromising fragment, "The Augustine Notebooks," contained in No Heroics, Please), though this is not corroborated elsewhere.

Works

Fiction

Collections

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (first published 1976) Furious Seasons (1977) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) Cathedral (1983) Elephant (1988)

Compilations

Where I'm Calling From (1988) Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993) - (film tie-in)

Individual stories include:

From "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?":

Nobody Said Anything The Student's Wife Neighbors Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

From "Furious Seasons":

Distance Dummy (revised title "The Third Thing that Killed My Father off") So Much Water So Close to Home

From "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love":

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Why Don't You Dance? Viewfinder

From "Cathedral"

Vitamins Careful Where I'm Calling From Chef's House Fever Feathers Cathedral A Small, Good Thing

From "Elephant"

Boxes Whoever Was Using This Bed Blackbird Pie Errand

Poetry

Collections

Near Klamath (1968) Winter Insomnia (1970) At Night The Salmon Move (1976) When 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. 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.