Raymond Carver

Introduction | Early Years | Literary Career | Last Years and Legacy

Introduction

Raymond Carver

Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, Raymond Carver moved at three with his parents to Yakima, Washington. His father, Clevie Raymond Carver ("C.R."), found employment in a saw mill there, but barely managed to support the family. His mother, Ella Casey Carter, worked at a series of low-paying jobs, becoming the sole provider for Carver and his brother, James, when his alcoholic father died at age 53. Carver spoke of walking everywhere as a child because his parents couldn't afford a car, and for many years, they had no indoor toilet. In high school, Carver received generally poor grades (Ds in English), and the only reading materials around his house were Zane Grey Westerns and the local paper—an unpromising beginning for a literary career.

In his early years Carver worked briefly at a lumber mill and at other unskilled jobs, including a stint as a tulip-picker. In 1957, he married Maryann Burk. They had two children, Christine and Vance, before he was twenty. Though young, unskilled, and already drinking heavily, Carver still found either his parents or his in-laws at the door, asking to be taken in. He experienced blue-collar desperation on terms more intimate than have most American writers, though he once quipped that, until he read critics' reactions to his works, he never realized that the characters in his stories "were so bad off."

Early Years

Carver attended several universities, including Chico State College, where he studied with novelist John Gardner and founded a student literary magazine. He also attended Humboldt State College (now California State University, Humboldt), where he earned a degree in 1963. He briefly attended the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, but pressured by the need to support his family, he returned to California, working for three years as a hospital custodian before finding a job editing textbooks. In 1967 he met Gordon Lish, the influential editor who would publish several of his stories in Esquire and had one of his early stories selected for The Best American Short Stories of 1967. Through the early 1970s, though plagued with bankruptcies, increasing dependency on alcohol, and marital problems, Carver held one-year creative writing positions at several universities. When his drinking made it difficult for him to keep a job, he entered a residential treatment program and took his last drink on June 2, 1977. He considered this to be the most important day in his life. He eventually become a full-time faculty member of the creative writing program at Syracuse University in 1980.

Literary Career

Carver's publishing career was bracketed by collections of poetry; Near Klamath (1968) was his first book, and A New Path to the Waterfall appeared posthumously in 1989. His collections of short stories include Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1977), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1984), and Where I'm Calling From (1988), which contained new and selected work. The compression of language he learned as a poet may in part account for the lean quality of his prose, what has been termed "minimalist," a term Carver himself did not like, complaining that the term "smacks of smallness of vision and execution." In Carver's work, the fish-filled rivers and magnificent landscapes of the Pacific Northwest provide ironic points of contrast with the grimy, working-class neighborhoods where he grew up and spent much of his adult life. Commenting on the processes of memory, he said, "I don't have the kind of memory that can bring entire conversations back to the present, complete with all the gestures and nuances of real speech; nor can I recall the furnishings of any room I've ever spent time in. . . I put the furnishings and the physical things surrounding the people into the stories as I need those things. Perhaps this is why its sometimes been said that my stories are unadorned, stripped down, even 'minimalist.' But maybe its nothing more than a working marriage of necessity and convenience that has brought me to writing the kind of stories that I do in the way that I do."

Last Years and Legacy

In his last decade Carver taught creative writing at Syracuse University, living with the poet Tess Gallagher, whom he married in 1988. His receipt of the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award in 1983 allowed him to devote his full time to writing, and he divided his remaining years between the East and Port Angeles, Washington. Carver's personal victory in 1977 over decades of alcoholism underscored the many professional triumphs of his final decade; he once said, "If you want the truth, I'm prouder of that, that I quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life." His reputation as a master craftsman of the contemporary short story was still growing at the end of his life, which ended prematurely after a struggle with lung cancer.

Raymond Carver in later years

Additional Resources: The online Bibliography includes an extended list of writings about Raymond Carver. Continue your Web Explorations by visiting Carver Links.

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