Raymond Carver

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Ella Beatrice Carter (née Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and a heavy drinker. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943. Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima. In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and 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, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just 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, while Maryann worked as an administrative assistant, high school English teacher, salesperson, and waitress. == Writing career ==

Carver moved to Paradise, California, with his family in 1958 to be close to his mother-in-law. He became interested in writing while attending Chico State College and enrolled in a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, then a recent doctoral graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. In 1961, Carver's first published story, "The Furious Seasons", appeared. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and is part of the collection, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me. Carver continued his studies under the short story writer Richard Cortez Day (alumnus of the Iowa program) beginning in autumn 1960 at Humboldt State College in Arcata. With his B-minus average, exacerbated by his penchant to forsake coursework for literary endeavors, ballasted by a sterling recommendation from Day, Carver was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop on a $1,000 fellowship for the 1963–1964 academic year. Homesick for California and unable to fully adjust to the program's upper middle class milieu, he only completed 12 credits out of the 30 required for a M.A. degree or 60 for the M.F.A. degree. Although program director Paul Engle awarded him a fellowship for a second year of study after Maryann Carver personally interceded and compared her husband's plight to Tennessee Williams' deleterious experience in the program three decades earlier, Carver decided to leave the University of Iowa at the end of the semester. According to biographer Carol Sklenicka, Carver falsely claimed to have received an M.F.A. from Iowa in 1966 on later curricula vitae. as Maryann finished her undergraduate degree, he continued his graduate studies in library science at San Jose State through the end of 1969 before failing once again to take a degree. During this period, he established vital literary connections with Gordon Lish, who worked across the street from Carver as director of linguistic research at Behavioral Research Laboratories, and the poet/publisher George Hitchcock. == Personal life and death ==

Decline of first marriage The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll's review of Maryann Burk Carver's 2006 memoir describes the decline of her and Raymond's marriage. 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. Second marriage In November 1977, Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas. Gallagher later remembered feeling "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 had been appointed the coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University; Carver taught as a professor in the English department. He and Gallagher jointly purchased a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. In ensuing years, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that read "Writers At Work" in order to be left alone. In 1982, he and his first wife, Maryann, were divorced. Death On August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into 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 directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management of his literary estate. ==Awards and memorials==

Carver was nominated for the National Book Award for his first major-press collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in 1977 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his third major-press collection, Cathedral (1983), the volume generally perceived as his best. Included in the latter collection are the award-winning stories "A Small, Good Thing", and "Where I'm Calling From". John Updike selected the latter for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. For his part, Carver perceived Cathedral as a watershed in his career for its shift toward a more optimistic and confidently poetic style amid the diminution of Lish's literary influence. Carver won five O. Henry Awards with "Are These Actual Miles" (originally titled "What Is It?") (1972), "Put Yourself in My Shoes" (1974), "Are You A Doctor?" (1975), "A Small, Good Thing" (1983), and "Errand" (1988). In Carver's birth town of Clatskanie, Oregon, a memorial park and statue are at the corner of Lillich and Nehalem streets, across from the library. A block away is the building where Carver was born. ==Legacy and posthumous publications==

In December 2006, Gallagher published an essay in The Sun magazine, titled "Instead of Dying", about alcoholism and Carver's having maintained his sobriety. The essay is an adaptation of a talk she initially delivered at the Welsh Academy's Academi Intoxication Conference in 2006. The first lines read: "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 Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale (2001) is a roman à clef about his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. Carver's high school sweetheart and first wife, Maryann Burk Carver, wrote a memoir of her years with Carver, What it Used to be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver (2006). In 2009, The New York Times Book Review and San Francisco Chronicle named Carol Sklenicka's unauthorized biography, ''Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009), published by Scribner, one of the Best Ten Books of that year; and the San Francisco Chronicle'' deemed it: "exhaustively researched and definitive biography". Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, refused to engage with Sklenicka. His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled Elephant and Other Stories in Britain (included in ''Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories) was composed in the five years before his death. The nature of these stories, especially "Errand", have led to some speculation that Carver was preparing to write a novel. Only one piece of this work has survived – the fragment "The Augustine Notebooks", first printed in No Heroics, Please''. Tess Gallagher fought with Knopf for permission to republish the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as they were originally written by Carver, as opposed to the heavily edited and altered versions that appeared in 1981 under the editorship of Gordon Lish. On October 1, 2009, the book, entitled Beginners, was released in hardback in Great Britain, followed by its publication in the Library of America edition which collected all of Carver's short fiction in a single volume. The Raymond Carver Reading Series at Syracuse University is a reading series program which annually brings 12 to 14 prominent writers to the campus. It is presented by the Creative Writing Program in SU's College of Arts and Sciences. ==Literary characteristics==

Carver's career emphasized 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: New and Selected Stories, 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." This was not simply a preference but, particularly at the beginning of his career, a practical consideration as he juggled writing with work. His subject matter was often focused on blue-collar experience, and was clearly reflective of his own life. Characteristics of minimalism are generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work, although, as reviewer David Wiegand notes: During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then poetry editor of Esquire. Carver's style has also been described as dirty realism, which connected him with a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff with both of whom Carver was closely acquainted, as well as others such as Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Jayne Anne Phillips. With the exception of Beattie, who wrote about upper-middle-class people, these were writers who focused on sadness and loss in the everyday lives of ordinary people—often lower-middle class or isolated and marginalized people. In his essay "On Influence", Carver states that, while he was an admirer of Ernest Hemingway's fiction, he never saw him as an influence, citing instead the work of Lawrence Durrell. ==Works==

Fiction Collections • Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (first published 1976) • Furious Seasons and Other Stories. (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1977) • What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) • Cathedral (1983) • Elephant and Other Stories (1988) – this title published only in Great Britain; included as a section of ''Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories'' in the U.S. • Beginners (2009) Compilations • ''Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories'' (1988) • Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993) – published to accompany the Robert Altman film Short Cuts • Collected Stories (2009) – complete short fiction including Beginners (see section above for wiki-link) Poetry Collections • Near Klamath (1968) • Winter Insomnia (1970) • At Night The Salmon Move (1976) • Fires (1983) (Also contains essays and stories) • Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985) • Ultramarine (1986) • A New Path To The Waterfall (1989) • Gravy (Unknown year) Compilations • In a Marine Light: Selected Poems (1988) • All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996) Screenplays • Dostoevsky (1982, with Tess Gallagher) (published in 1985) • Purple Lake (1983, with Michael Cimino) (unpublished) ==Films and theatre adaptations==

• I Could See the Smallest Things... a 1982 Clark University stage production based on five stories from Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love • Short Cuts directed by Robert Altman (1993), based on nine Carver short stories and a poem • Everything Goes directed by Andrew Kotatko (2004), starring Hugo Weaving, Abbie Cornish and Sullivan Stapleton based on Carver's short story "Why Don't You Dance?" • Jindabyne directed by Ray Lawrence (2006), based on Carver's short story "So Much Water So Close to Home" • Everything Must Go directed by Dan Rush (2010), and starring Will Ferrell, based on Carver's short story "Why Don't You Dance?" • Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, depicts the mounting of a Broadway production of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" as its central storyline. The film's main character, Riggan Thomson, attributes his choice of acting as a profession to a complimentary note he once received from Raymond Carver written on a cocktail napkin. The film also preludes with Carver's poem "Late Fragment." In February 2015, Birdman won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. • Whoever Was Using This Bed, directed by Andrew Kotatko (2016), starring Jean-Marc Barr, Radha Mitchell and Jane Birkin, based on Carver's short story of the same name ==References==