RAYMOND CARVER WAS BORN ON THIS DATE
American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver was born on this date in 1938. Carver is considered a major late 20th century American writer. He is also credited with being a major influence in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.
Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, on May 25, 1938, to laborer Clevie Raymond Carver and homemaker Ella Beatrice Carver. At an early age, Carver moved with his family to the working-class town of Yakima, Washington. Throughout his life, he drew on his experiences in the Pacific Northwest as settings for his stories.
Carver graduated from high school in 1956 and took a job working at a sawmill. In 1957, he married Maryann Burk, who was pregnant with their first child. By the time he was twenty, Carver was the father of two children. He and his wife worked menial jobs in order to pay their bills. Like many of the couples in Carver's short stories, he and his wife lived a hand-to-mouth existence, always in fear of some catastrophe that would upset their fragile solvency.
Carver, who wanted to write, studied under novelist John Gardner at Chico State in California. Still working low-paying jobs to support the family, he managed to take enough classes to graduate from Humboldt State University in 1963. After briefly attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he moved to Sacramento, California, where he became a hospital custodian for three years. During this time, he began writing seriously and publishing his stories.
Carver suffered personal turmoil in 1967, both losing his father and filing for bankruptcy. However, in the same year, his story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" was chosen for The Best American Short Stories, 1967. Carver met with increasing success publishing his stories during the next few years. As a result, he was offered a number of teaching positions at universities. At the same time, alcohol increasingly began to affect his life. In 1976, unemployed and bankrupt, he began to drink very heavily. Carver and his wife separated and he underwent repeated hospitalizations for alcoholism.
In 1977, Carver met poet Tess Gallagher, and by 1979, the two were living together and teaching creative writing at Syracuse University. Carver's well-received collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love appeared in 1981. With his writing flourishing and his personal life with Gallagher happy, Carver brought his drinking under control. He and his wife Maryann finally divorced in 1983.
In September of 1983, Carver published the collection Cathedral. The book marked a shift in Carver's fiction away from the bare minimalist prose of his earlier work toward a fuller, more detailed style. Critics hailed the book as a transition in Carver's work, singling out several stories, including the title story, "Cathedral," for praise.
Carver began battling cancer in 1987. Nevertheless, he continued to write, publishing his last major collection, Where I'm Calling From, in 1988. He married Gallagher in June, 1988, and died at their home in Port Angeles, Washington, on August 2, 1988.
The inscription on his grave 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.
Source Citation
"Raymond Carver." LitFinder Contemporary Collection. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 25 May 2010.
Document URL
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