Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) is an American short story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of American short stories during the 1980s.
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Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a factory town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, son of Ella Beatrice (nÃÆ' Â © e Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a sawmill from Arkansas, was a fisherman and heavy drinker. Carver's mother works and quits as a waiter and retailer. His brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.
Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time, he read most of Mickey Spillane's novels or publications like Sports Afield and Outdoor Life , and hunting and fishing with friends and family. After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father in a sawmill in California. In June 1957, at the age of 19, he married Maryann Burk, 16, who had just graduated from 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. She supports her family by working as an introduction, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill. During their marriage, Maryann also supports families with jobs including administrative assistants and high school English teachers, salespeople, and servants.
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Writing career
Carver became interested in writing in Paradise, California, where he moved with his family to be close to his mother-in-law. While studying at Chico State College, he attended a creative writing course taught by novelist John Gardner, a recent doctoral graduate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. The first story published by Carver, "The Furious Seasons", appeared in 1961. More luxurious than his later works, his story greatly influenced the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious Seasons" was later used as the title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and now in the latest collection, No Heroics, Please and Contact If You Need Me
It is a common misconception that Carver is influenced by Ernest Hemingway, since both authors show the same prose style as economical and plain. In his essay "On Influence", however, Carver states clearly that, while he is a Hemingway fictional admirer, he has never seen it as an influence, citing not the work of Lawrence Durrell.
Carver continued his studies under the short story writer Richard Cortez Day (such as Gardner, a recent PhD alumnus of the Iowa program) at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California. After choosing not to take the foreign language courses required by the English program, he received a B.A. in a general study in 1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, a university literary magazine, where he published several of his own works under his own name and also his pseudonym. John Vale.
With his B-average - aggravated by his penchant for leaving the course for literary efforts - voiced by sterling recommendations from Day, Carver received the Iowa Writers' Workshop on a $ 1,000 scholarship for the 1963-1964 academic year. Homesick for California and unable to fully adapt to the upper middle class program, he only completed 12 credits of the 30 required for a M.A. or 60 for M.F.A. degree. Although he was awarded a scholarship for a second year of study by program director Paul Engle, after Maryann Carver personally mediated and compared her husband's suffering with the annoying experience of Tennessee Williams in the previous three decades, Carver decided to leave Iowa University at the end of the term. According to biographer Carol Sklenicka, she falsely claimed to have received M.F.A. from Iowa in 1966 on the later curriculum vitae. Maryann (who delayed completing her education to support her husband's educational and literary endeavors) eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977. After completing graduate work at Stanford, she was briefly enrolled at the University of California , Santa Barbara's English doctoral program, while Carver taught at the institution as a visiting lecturer in 1974.
In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, California, where he worked briefly in a bookstore before taking up the position of night watchman at Mercy Hospital. He does all the cleaning work in the first hour and then writes through the rest of his shift. He audited the class in what was then Sacramento State College, including a workshop with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first poetry book, Near Klamath , under Schmitz's guidance.
With the appearance of "Would You Be Calm, Please?" in the Annual Martha Foley Best American Short Stories anthology and upcoming publication Near Klamath by the English Language Club of Sacramento State College, 1967 was an important year for Carver. He was briefly enrolled in the library science graduate program at the University of Iowa that summer but returned to California after the death of his father. Shortly after that, Sculptor moved to Palo Alto, California, so he could take his first white-collar job at Science Research Associates (an IBM subsidiary near Menlo Park, California), where he worked intermittently as a textbook and relationship editor community director until 1970. After living 1968 in Israel, Sculptor moved to San Jose, California; when Maryann finished her bachelor degree, she continued her studies in library science at San Jose State until the end of 1969 before failing once again to take the title. Nevertheless, he built important literary connections with Gordon Lish (who worked across the street from Carver as director of linguistic research at Behavioral Research Laboratories) and poet/publisher George Hitchcock during this period.
After the publication of "Neighbors" in the June 1971 edition of Esquire at the encouragement of Lish (who is now inaugurated as a magazine fiction editor), Carver began teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz at the provost command James B. Hall (Iowa alumni and an early mentor to Ken Kesey at the University of Oregon), departing from his new home in Sunnyvale, California. After a series of failed applications, he received a $ 4,000 Stegner Fellowship to study at a prestigious non-graduate creative degree program at Stanford University during the period 1972-1973, where he established friendships with Kesey era figures Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman in addition to his contemporaries Chuck Kinder, Max Crawford, and William Kittredge. The Guild allows the Engraver to buy a home in Cupertino, California. He took up another teaching job at the University of California, Berkeley that year and briefly hired a pied-ÃÆ' -terre in town; this development was largely precipitated by her incitement of extramarital affairs with Diane Cecily, a Montana University administrator and a friend with Kittredge, who would later marry Kinder.
For years working in various jobs, raising children, and trying to write, Carver began to abuse alcohol. With his own admission, he basically stopped writing and drinking full time. In the autumn semester of 1973, Carver was a guest lecturer at the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they were less teaching than drinking and hardly any writing. With the help of Kinder and Kittredge, he attempted to simultaneously go to Berkeley and retain his post in Santa Cruz; After losing all but a handful of classes because of the inherent logistical barriers of this arrangement (and various alcohol-related illnesses), Hall gently ordered Carver to resign from his position. The following year, after leaving Iowa City, Carver went to the treatment center to try to overcome his alcoholic addiction, but continued to drink for three years.
His first set of short stories, Will You Be Calm, Please? , published in 1976. The collection itself was selected for the National Book Award, although it sold less than 5,000 copies that year.
After being hospitalized three times (between June 1976 and February or March 1977), Carver started "second life" and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. While he continued smoking marijuana regularly and then experimenting with cocaine on orders from Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City, Carver believed he would die of alcohol at the age of 40 if he did not overcome his drinking.
Carver was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his third major collection, Cathedral (1984), a volume generally regarded as the best. Included in the collection are the award-winning stories of "A Small, Good Thing", and "Where I'm Calling From". John Updike chose the latter to be included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. For his part, Carver perceives Cathedral as a turning point in his career as his transformation leads to a more optimistic and confident poetic style amid the diminishing influence of Lish's literature.
Personal life and death
Decline the first marriage
The following quote from Scott Driscoll's review of Maryann Burk Carver's 2006 memoir describes Maryann and Raymond's marriage decline.
Autumn begins with Ray's journey to Missoula, Mont., In '72 for a fishing trip with friend and coauthor Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at Montana University, whom he met at Kittredge's birthday party. "That's when the serious drink starts, it breaks my heart and hurts the kids, it changes everything."
"In the fall of '74," Carver wrote, "he's dead rather than alive, I have to get out of my Ph.D. so I can get him cleaned up and drive him to his class." Over the next few years, Maryann's husband tortured her physically. Friends urged him to leave Raymond.
"But I can not, I really want to stay there for the long haul, I think I can live longer than drinking, I'll do whatever it takes, I love Ray, first, last and always."
Carver explained, without a trace of revenge, what ultimately made it beyond the limit. In the fall of '78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas in El Paso, Ray began to see Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would be his inspiration and his wife towards the end of his life. "It's like a contretemps, he's trying to get me to talk about where we are, I miss calls, he knows he'll invite Tess to Thanksgiving." So he wrote a letter.
"I think I've been through years of struggling to keep things balanced, here it comes to me again, the same thing, I have to go on with my own life, but I never fall in love with him."
Second marriage
Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at the author's conference in Dallas, Texas, in November 1977. In early January 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas, in a loan hut near Port Angeles, Washington, and in Tucson, Arizona. In 1980, the two moved to Syracuse, New York, where Gallagher was appointed as coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University; Carver teaches as a professor in English. He and Gallagher together bought a house in Syracuse, on 832 Maryland Avenue. In subsequent years, homes became so popular that couples had to hang signs outside that read "Writers at Work" to be left alone. In 1982, Carver and his first wife, Maryann, were divorced. He married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50 years. That same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Art and Literature.
In December 2006, Gallagher published an essay in The Sun magazine, entitled "Instead of Dying", about alcoholism and Carver who has maintained his composure. This essay is an adaptation of a lecture he initially presented at the Academy of Welsh Academy of Intoxication Conference in 2006. The first line reads: "Instead of dying of alcohol, Raymond Carver chose to live, I will see him five months after this option, so I never know that Ray is drinking, except with reports and through the characters and actions of his stories and poems. "
Death
On August 2, 1988, Carver died of lung cancer at the age of 50 years. He is buried at the Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. The inscription on his tombstone reads:
His poem "Gravy" is also written.
When Carver will direct, Tess Gallagher assumes real estate management literature.
Old and posthumous publications
Novelis Chuck Kinder published Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale (2001), a romance ÃÆ' clef about his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. Carver's high school sweetheart and first wife, Maryann Burk Carver, wrote a memoir about the years of her life with Carver, What It Was Like: A Portrait of My Marriage with Raymond Carver (2006).
The New York Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle named the biographical biography of Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009) by Scribner, one of the Top Ten Books of the year; and the San Francisco Chronicle thinks it is: "a thoroughly and definitively reviewed biography." Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, refused to be involved with Sklenicka.
His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled Elephant in England (included in "Where I'm Calling From") was compiled within five years before his death. The nature of these stories, especially "Errand", has led to some speculation that Carver is preparing to write a novel. Only one part of this work survives - the "The Augustine Notebooks" fragment, first printed in No Heroics, Please .
Tess Gallagher published the five stories of Carver posthumously on Call If You Need Me ; one of the stories ("Kindling") won the O. Henry Award in 1999. In his life, Carver won five O. Henry Awards; The victory story is "Are This Actual Miles" (1972), "Place Yourself on My Shoes" (1974), "Are You a Doctor?" (1975), "A Small, Good Thing" (1983), and "Errand" (1988).
Tess Gallagher fought with Knopf to ask permission to republish the stories in What We Speak About When We Talk About Love as originally written by Carver, as opposed to the many versions edited and modified which appeared in 1981 under editor Gordon Lish. The book, entitled Beginner , was released in hardback form on October 1, 2009 in the United Kingdom, followed by its publication in the US in the American Library edition collecting all of Carver's short fictions in one volume.
Literary Characteristics
Carver's career is dedicated to short stories and poetry. He describes himself as "inclined towards the brevity and intensity" and "addictive short story writing" (in the preface Where I Call From , the collection published in 1988 and the recipient of honorable mention in article 2006 < i> New York Times quotes the best works of fiction from the previous 25 years). Another reason stated for the brevity is "that the story [or poetry] can be written and read in one sitting." It's not just a preference, but, especially early in his career, practical considerations as he juggles writing with work. The subject is often focused on the blue-collar experience, and clearly reflects his own life.
Minimalist characteristics are generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work, though, as noted by reviewers, David Wiegand:
Carver never regarded himself as minimalist or in any category, for that matter.
"He rejected the category in general," Sklenicka said. "I do not think he has any abstract thoughts at all, he just is not built like that, that's why he's so clever about picking the right details that will stand for many things."
Carver's editor at Esquire, Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping Carver's prose in this direction - where his previous tutor John Gardner suggested Carver to use fifteen words rather than twenty-five, Lish instructed Carver to use five at place fifteen. Towards "cutting and transplanting operations" from Lish's heavy editing, Carver finally sever links with her. During this time, Carver also handed poetry to James Dickey, then the poetry editor of Esquire.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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