Raymond Carver

Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. was an American short story writer and poet, born on May 25, 1938, in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River. He grew up in Yakima, Washington, in a family marked by work, movement, and plain necessity. His father, Clevie Raymond Carver, was a sawmill worker from Arkansas, a fisherman, and a heavy drinker. His mother, Ella Beatrice Carter Carver, worked on and off as a waitress and retail clerk. Carver came of age reading Mickey Spillane novels, Sports Afield, and Outdoor Life, and spending time hunting and fishing with friends and family.

After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In 1957, at nineteen, he married Maryann Burk, who was sixteen. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born later that year, and their son, Vance Lindsay, was born the following year. While Maryann worked as an administrative assistant, English teacher, salesperson, and waitress, Carver held jobs as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer. Those years of labor and young family life formed the ground from which his writing would later grow.

Carver became interested in writing after moving with his family to Paradise, California, and attending Chico State College. There he took a creative writing course with the novelist John Gardner, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who became a mentor and had a major influence on his life and career. Carver’s first published story, “The Furious Seasons,” appeared in 1961 and showed the influence of William Faulkner. He later studied at Humboldt State College with Richard Cortez Day, edited the college literary magazine Toyon, and published work under his own name and the pseudonym John Vale. He received a B.A. in general studies in 1963.

Carver’s education and working life rarely moved in a straight line. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on a fellowship in 1963 to 1964 but left without completing a degree. In Sacramento, while working nights as a custodian at Mercy Hospital, he finished his janitorial work early and wrote through the rest of the shift. He audited classes at Sacramento State College, became friends with poet Dennis Schmitz, and, under Schmitz’s guidance, published his first book of poems, Near Klamath, in 1967. That same year, his story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” appeared in Martha Foley’s annual Best American Short Stories anthology.

Carver’s first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976. His breakout collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, appeared in 1981, received immediate acclaim, and established him as an important figure in the literary world. He followed it with Cathedral in 1983, a book he considered his watershed and which is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Where I’m Calling From, the definitive collection of his stories, was published shortly before his death on August 2, 1988. In nominating him for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989, the jury wrote that the recent revival of the short story was attributable “in great measure to Carver’s mastery of the form.” His words still speak because they were built from close attention to ordinary rooms, ordinary work, and the charged silences of ordinary lives.