Raymond Carver Biography and List of Works

American short-story writer and poet, a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s. Carver's reputation continued to grow after his death at the age of fifty. Robert Altman's much praised film Short Cuts (1993) was based on several of Carver's stories. His short fiction is often placed in the realistic tradition of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway and is linked to the rise of minimalism as practiced by such writers as Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff.

"I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them; and the fact - so crucially important to me back at the beginning and now still a consideration - that the story can be written and read in one sitting. (Like poems!)
(from foreword in Where I'm Calling From, 1998)

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, a mill town on the Columbia River in Oregon. His father was a sawmill worker, a violent alcoholic, and mother was a waitress. He was educated at Locas school in Yokima, Washington. In 1957 at the age of 19, he married sixteen-year-old Maryann Burk. After finishing high school Carver supported his family by working as a janitor, gas-station attendant, and deliveryman.

In 1959 he moved from Oregon to Paradise, California, where he became interested in writing. He attended a creative-writing course, and was taught by John Gardner. Carver continued his studies first at Humboldt State College in California, receiving his B.A. in 1963, and at the University of Iowa, from which he received an M.F.A. in 1966. Carver taught for several years in universities throughout the United States from the 1970s. From 1980 to 1983 he was a professor of English at Syracuse University.

Carver published his fist collection of short stories, PUT YOURSELF IN MY SHOES, in 1974, and established his reputation in 1976 by WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE? In these stories Carver mixed Chekhov's lyrical realism with the dark, uncanny tones of Franz Kafka. In 1981 appeared WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, which was marked by deeper humanism and more complex psychological characterization. In these seventeen elliptical stories Carver explored failure, the gap between expression and feeling, alcoholism, infidelity. His works appeared in a number of the volumes of the Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received several awards, among them The National Endowment for the Arts award in fiction (1980) and Guggenheim fellowship (1979-80). In 1983 he was recipient of the "Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings", which was conferred by a special panel of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

On June 2, 1977 Carver stopped drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. After this 'line of demarcation' his stories became increasingly more expansive. His first marriage ended in 1977 and Carver married his long-term partner, the poet Tess Gallagher (b.1943), whom he had met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas. The wedding took place in Reno and two months later, on August 2, 1988, the author died of cancer. Selection of his short fiction, WHERE I'M CALLING FROM, appeared posthumously in 1989.

"I feel depressed. But I won't go into it with her. I've already told her too much.
She sits there waiting, her dainty fingers poking her hair.
Waiting for what? I'd like to know.
It is August.
My life is going to change - I feel it."
(from 'Fat' in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, 1976)

In his short stories Carver depicted the life of the white- and blue-collar workers, salesmen, waitresses, and their sense of betrayal and inability to communicate with others. His prose style is often seen as overtly natural, even anti-climatic. The atmosphere is tense, reminding the ominous mood of Kafka or Harold Pinter. Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, Carver pioneered a precisionist realist and became one of the leading figures among so-called 'dirty realists' with Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, and Jayne Anne Philips, who depicted the quiet desperation of blue-collar America. His characters lead unheroic lives, without the ability to express themselves. Things are frequently left unspoken and conflicts unresolved. The overall effect is to convey the meaning of the story obliquely through implication. Much of what he wrote about was based on his own experiences in the Pacific Northwest.

Carver's poetry was written in the vernacular lyric-narrative mode of William Carlos Williams and Charles Bukowski. In 1984 Carver returned to Pacific Northwest and published two collections of poetry, WHERE WATER COMES TOGETHER WITH OTHER WATER (1985) and ULTRAMARINE (1986). He shared the 1985 Levinson Prize for these poems.

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.
(from 'Last Fragment')

For further information: Encyclopedia of World Literature, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 1); Cult Fiction by Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard (1998); Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography by Sam Halpert (1995); The Stories of Raymond Carver by K. Nesset (1995); The Reader's Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, ed. by Peter Parker (1995); Remembering Ray, ed. by W. Stull and M.P. Carroll (1993); Reading Raymond Carver by Randolph Paul Runyon and Stephen Dobyns (1992); Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction by E. Campbell (1992); When We Talk About Raymond Carver, ed. by S. Haplert (1991); Understanding Raymond Carver by A.M. Saltzman (1988).

CARNATIONS, (1962)