Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. He published his first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, in 1976. His most successful collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), received immediate praise and helped establish Carver as a significant figure in literature. He later wrote Cathedral in 1983, which he considered his most important work and is widely seen as his greatest achievement. The complete collection of his stories, Where I'm Calling From, was published shortly before his death in 1988. In their 1989 nomination of Carver for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the jury stated, "The recent rise in popularity of the short story is largely due to Carver's skill in writing them."

Early life

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town with a sawmill on the Columbia River. He grew up in Yakima, Washington, and was the son of Ella Beatrice Carter (née Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father was a sawmill worker from Arkansas who also worked as a fisherman and drank heavily. His mother sometimes worked as a waitress and a retail clerk. His brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.

Carver attended local schools in Yakima. In his free time, he read books by Mickey Spillane and magazines like Sports Afield and Outdoor Life. He also 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, when he was 19 years old, he married Maryann Burk, who was 16 years old and had recently graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born a year later. Carver worked as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer. Maryann worked as an administrative assistant, high school English teacher, salesperson, and waitress.

Writing career

In 1958, Carver moved to Paradise, California, with his family to live near his mother-in-law. While studying at Chico State College, he became interested in writing and took a creative writing class taught by John Gardner, a novelist who had recently finished his doctorate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Gardner became an important teacher and influenced Carver’s life and work. In 1961, Carver published his first story, "The Furious Seasons," which was more elaborate than his later work and showed the influence of William Faulkner. This story later appeared in a collection titled No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me, published by Capra Press.

Carver continued his studies in 1960 at Humboldt State College in Arcata under Richard Cortez Day, a writer who had studied at Iowa. He avoided required foreign language courses and earned a B.A. in general studies in 1963. During this time, he was first published and worked as an editor for Toyon, the college’s literary magazine. He published his own work under his name and the pen name John Vale.

Carver had a B-minus average because he focused more on writing than coursework. However, a strong recommendation from Day helped him gain admission to the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1963–1964 with a $1,000 fellowship. He missed many classes and struggled to adjust to the program’s environment. Though a second year was offered after his wife, Maryann, compared his situation to a past student’s experience, Carver left the program. Later, he falsely claimed on his resume to have earned an M.F.A. from Iowa in 1966. Maryann supported his education and eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970, teaching English until 1977. She briefly studied for a doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when Carver taught there in 1974.

In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family lived in Sacramento. He worked briefly at a bookstore and later as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital, cleaning first and writing during the rest of his shift. He took classes at Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz, who helped Carver publish his first poetry collection, Near Klamath.

In 1967, Carver’s story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" appeared in Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories anthology, and his poetry collection Near Klamath was published. He briefly studied library science at the University of Iowa but returned to California after his father’s death. The family moved to Palo Alto, where Carver worked as a textbook editor and public relations director for Science Research Associates, an IBM subsidiary, until 1970.

After a 1968 trip to Israel, the family relocated to San Jose, California. While Maryann completed her degree, Carver studied library science at San Jose State until 1969. During this time, he formed connections with Gordon Lish, a magazine editor, and George Hitchcock, a poet and publisher.

In 1971, Lish helped publish Carver’s story "Neighbors" in Esquire, leading to a teaching position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He commuted from Sunnyvale, California.

After multiple failed attempts to join the Stegner Fellowship, Carver was admitted to Stanford’s non-degree creative writing program in 1972–1973. He studied with writers like Ed McClanahan and Chuck Kinder and earned a $4,000 stipend, allowing the family to buy a home in Cupertino. He also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, but had an affair with Diane Cecily, a friend of a classmate.

While working various jobs and raising children, Carver began drinking heavily. He stopped writing and focused on drinking full-time. In 1973, he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop but spent more time drinking than teaching. With help from friends, he tried to balance teaching at Berkeley and Santa Cruz but failed due to alcohol-related issues. He resigned and entered a treatment program but continued drinking for three more years.

In 1976, Carver’s first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award but sold fewer than 5,000 copies.

Personal life and death

The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll's review of Maryann Burk Carver's 2006 memoir describes the decline of her and Raymond's marriage.

The problems began when Ray traveled to Missoula, Montana, in 1972 to fish with a friend named Bill Kittredge, who also helped with his writing. That summer, Ray met Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, at a birthday party. "That's when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt our children. It changed everything."

By fall of 1974, Carver wrote, "he was more dead than alive. I had to leave my PhD program so I could help him get better and take him to his classes." Over the next several years, Maryann's husband physically hurt her. Friends told her to leave Raymond.

"But I couldn't. I really wanted to keep trying for a long time. I thought I could stop the drinking. I would do anything. I loved Ray, first, last, and always."

Carver describes, without anger, what finally made her decide to leave. In the fall of 1978, with a new teaching job at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who later became his wife. "It was like a problem. 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 things balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never stopped loving him."

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. While he continued to smoke cannabis and later tried cocaine at the request of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City, Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at age 40 if he had not stopped drinking.

In November 1977, Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas. Gallagher later said she felt "as if my life until then had simply been a rehearsal for meeting him." 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 worked as the coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University. Carver taught English there. He and Gallagher bought a house in Syracuse at 832 Maryland Avenue. Over time, the house became so popular that the couple put up a sign outside that read "Writers At Work" to have some privacy. In 1982, he and his first wife, Maryann, divorced.

On June 17, 1988, six weeks before his death, Carver and Gallagher married in Reno, Nevada. On August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles from lung cancer at age 50. In the same year, he was added to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. 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 said, Tess Gallagher took care of his books and writings.

Awards and memorials

Raymond Carver was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977 for his first major collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 for his third major collection, Cathedral, which many people consider his best work. This collection includes the award-winning stories "A Small, Good Thing" and "Where I'm Calling From." John Updike chose "Where I'm Calling From" to be included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Carver believed that Cathedral marked an important turning point in his career because it showed a more hopeful and poetic style, even as the influence of his editor, Gordon Lish, decreased. Carver won five O. Henry Awards for his stories: "Are These Actual Miles" (originally titled "What Is It?") in 1972, "Put Yourself in My Shoes" in 1974, "Are You A Doctor?" in 1975, "A Small, Good Thing" in 1983, and "Errand" in 1988.

In Carver’s birthplace, Clatskanie, Oregon, there is a memorial park and statue at the corner of Lillich and Nehalem streets, across from the library. A short distance away is the building where Carver was born.

Legacy and posthumous publications

In December 2006, Gallagher wrote an essay for The Sun magazine called "Instead of Dying," which discusses alcoholism and how Raymond Carver stayed sober. The essay was based on a speech she gave at the Welsh Academy's Academi Intoxication Conference in 2006. The essay begins with these words: "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."

Chuck Kinder's book Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale (2001) is a roman à clef, which means it is based on real people and events, about his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. Maryann Burk Carver, Carver's high school sweetheart and first wife, wrote a memoir titled What it Used to be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver (2006), describing her life with him.

In 2009, The New York Times Book Review and San Francisco Chronicle listed Carol Sklenicka's biography Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009), published by Scribner, as one of the best books of that year. The San Francisco Chronicle called the book "thoroughly researched and definitive." Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, did not participate in Sklenicka's work.

Carver's final, unfinished collection of seven stories, titled Elephant and Other Stories (included in Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories), was written in the five years before his death. Some of these stories, especially "Errand," suggest Carver may have been planning to write a novel. Only one part of this work remains: the fragment "The Augustine Notebooks," first published in No Heroics, Please.

Tess Gallagher worked with Knopf to republish the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as Carver originally wrote them, rather than the heavily edited versions published in 1981 by Gordon Lish. On October 1, 2009, the book Beginners was released in hardback in Great Britain. It was later published in the Library of America edition, which includes all of Carver's short stories in one volume.

The Raymond Carver Reading Series at Syracuse University is a program that brings 12 to 14 well-known writers to the campus each year. It is organized by the Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University.

Literary characteristics

Carver's career focused on short stories and poetry. He described himself as "preferred short, powerful writing" and "interested in writing short stories" (in the foreword of Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, a collection published in 1988 and received an honorable mention in the 2006 New York Times article listing the best works of fiction from the previous 25 years). Another reason he wrote short pieces was that "a story or poem can be written and read in one sitting." This was not just a choice but also a practical need early in his career, as he balanced writing with his job. His stories often focused on the lives of working-class people, reflecting his own experiences.

A key feature of Carver's writing is minimalism, though he never considered himself a minimalist or part of any specific group. As reviewer David Wiegand noted, Carver avoided labels. Sklenicka explained that Carver did not think in abstract ways and instead focused on choosing simple, meaningful details that represented larger ideas.

Carver's editor at Esquire, Gordon Lish, helped shape his writing style. While Carver's earlier teacher, John Gardner, advised him to use 15 words instead of 25, Lish told him to use 5 words instead of 15. Carver disagreed with Lish's heavy editing, which he called "surgical amputation and transplantation," and eventually ended their collaboration. During this time, Carver also sent poetry to James Dickey, who was the poetry editor at Esquire.

Carver's style is often called "dirty realism," which linked him to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s, including Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, with whom he was close. Other writers in this group included Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Jayne Anne Phillips. Except for Beattie, who wrote about upper-middle-class people, these writers focused on sadness and loss in the daily lives of ordinary people, often from the lower-middle class or those who felt isolated or overlooked.

In his essay "On Influence," Carver said he admired Ernest Hemingway's work but did not see Hemingway as an influence. Instead, he cited the work of Lawrence Durrell.