Raymond Carver
Raymond
Carver, in full Raymond Clevie Carver
(b. May 25, 1938, Clatskanie, Ore.,
U.S.—d. 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). Carver’s
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
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 for alcoholism
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 full-time. His later
short-story collections were What We
Talk About When We Talk About Love
(1981), Cathedral (1984), and Where I’m
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. Carver’s poetry collections
include At Night the Salmon Move (1976),
Where Water Comes Together with Other
Water (1985), and Ultramarine (1986). He
died of lung cancer at 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. Carver’s
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 Carver’s writing—and even his
lasting literary reputation—in the early
21st century. It was revealed that his
long-time editor, Gordon Lish, had
drastically changed many of Carver’s
early stories. While Lish’s significant
involvement in Carver’s writing had long
been suspected, the extent of his
editing became public knowledge when, in
2007, Carver’s 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
in the U.K. as Beginners in 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 Carver’s
famously terse sentences were his own,
as was the hallmark bleak, working-class
milieu of the short stories.
