“Wonderful what Hollywood will do to a nobody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver's shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunch-box. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blasé and dec adent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture-mover in a sweaty undershirt.”
―from THE LITTLE SISTER by Raymond ChandlerThe Lady in the Lake moves Marlowe out of his usual habitat of city streets and into the mountains outside of Los Angeles in his strange search for a missing woman. The Little Sister takes Marlowe to Hollywood, where he tries to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother, uncovering on the way a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more than enough murder. In The Long Goodbye, a case involving a war-scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife has Marlowe constantly on the move: a psychotic gangster’s on his trail, he’s in trouble with the cops, and more and more corpses keep turning up. Playback features a well-endowed redhead who leads Marlowe to the California coast to solve a tale of big money and, of course, murder. Throughout these masterpieces, Marlowe’s wry humor and existential sense of his job prove yet again why he has become one of the most recognized and imitated characters in fiction.
*****
Raymond Carver |
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 |
| Born | May 25, 1938
Clatskanie, Oregon, United States |
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| Died | August 2, 1988 (aged 50)
Port Angeles, Washington, United States |
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| Occupation | Writer |
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| Nationality | American |
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| Period | 1958–1988 |
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| Literary movement | Minimalism, Dirty realism |
|---|
|
Influenced Jay McInerney, Robert Altman, Richard Ford, Per Petterson, Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tess Gallagher, Mona Simpson, K.J. Stevens, Haruki Murakami, Tom Perrotta |
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American
short story writer and
poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.
Life
Carver was born in
Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the
Columbia River, and grew up in
Yakima, Washington.
[1] His father, a skilled 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 one brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.
Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. 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, aged 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk. She had just graduated from a private
Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. When their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year, Carver was 20. Carver supported his family by working as a janitor, sawmill laborer, delivery man, and library assistant. During their marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, administrative assistant, and high school English teacher.
Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in
Paradise. Carver attended a creative-writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. Carver continued his studies first at
Chico State University and then at
Humboldt State College in
Arcata, California, where he studied with Richard Cortez Day and received his B.A. in 1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the university literary magazine, in which he included several of his own pieces under pseudonyms. He later attended the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the
University of Iowa, for one year. Maryann graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.
In the mid-1960s Carver and his family lived in
Sacramento, where he worked as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He would do all of the janitorial work in the first hour and then write at the hospital through the rest of the night. He sat in on classes at what was then
Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet
Dennis Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver's first book of poems,
Near Klamath, was later written and published under Schmitz's guidance.
With his appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of
Near Klamath by the English Club of Sacramento State College, and the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year for Carver. That was also the year that he moved his family to
Palo Alto, California, so that he could take a job as a textbook editor for Science Research Associates. He worked there until he was fired in 1970 for his inappropriate writing style. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at universities throughout the United States.
During his years of working different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily.
[1] By his own admission, eventually he more or less gave up writing and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a teacher in the
Iowa Writers' Workshop with
John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Cheever went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his
alcoholism, but Carver continued drinking for three years. 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.
[1]Carver met the poet
Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in
Dallas, Texas in November, 1977. Beginning in January, 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas, in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, in western Washington state, and in
Tucson, Arizona. In 1980, the two moved to
Syracuse, 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, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced.
[2] 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. In the same year, he was inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Raymond Carver is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in
Port Angeles, WA. The inscription on his tombstone reads:
LATE FRAGMENTAnd did you get whatyou wanted from this life, even so?I did.And what did you want?To call myself beloved, to feel myselfbeloved on the earth.His poem
Gravy is also inscribed.
As Carver's will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management of his
literary estate.
Legacy
In 2001 the novelist
Chuck Kinder published
Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, a
roman à clef of his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. In 2006 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. An unauthorized biography,
Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life by
Carol Sklenicka, published by Scribner in 2009, was named one of the Best Ten Books of that year by The New York Times Book Review.
[3] Carver's widow refused to cooperate with Sklenica.
[4]Writing
Carver's career was dedicated to 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, 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. The same could probably be said of the recurring theme of alcoholism and recovery.
Carver's writing style and themes are often identified with
Ernest Hemingway,
Anton Chekhov, and
Franz Kafka.
[citation needed] Carver also referred to
Isaac Babel,
Frank O'Connor, and
V. S. Pritchett as influences. Chekhov, however, seems the greatest influence, motivating him to write
Errand, one of his final stories, about the Russian writer's final hours.
Minimalism is generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work. His editor at
Esquire magazine,
Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping Carver's prose in this direction - where his earlier tutor John Gardner had advised Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five,
Gordon Lish instructed Carver to use five in place of fifteen. Objecting to the "surgical amputation and transplantation" of Lish's heavy editing, Carver eventually broke with him.
[5] During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to
James Dickey, then poetry editor of
Esquire. His 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,
Tobias Wolff -- two writers Carver was closely acquainted with—as well as
Ann Beattie 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—who represent
Henry David Thoreau's idea of living lives of "quiet desperation."
His first published story appeared in 1960, titled "The Furious Seasons." 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 can now be found in recent collections
No Heroics, Please and
Call If You Need Me.
His first collection,
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was first published in 1976; the title story had appeared in the
Best American Short Stories 1967 collection. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year.
Carver was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection,
Cathedral, the volume generally perceived as his best. Included in the 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 saw
Cathedral as a watershed in his career, in its shift towards a more optimistic and confidently poetic style.
His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled
Elephant in Britain (included in "Where I'm Calling From") 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 unpromising fragment "The Augustine Notebooks," printed in
No Heroics, Please.
Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories posthumously in
Call If You Need Me; one of the stories ("Kindling") won an
O. Henry Award in 1999. Throughout his lifetime Carver won six O. Henry Awards: the winning stories were "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).
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 (or "heavy edits") and altered versions that appeared in 1981 under the editorship of Gordon Lish.
[6][7] The book, entitled 'Beginners',
[8] was released in hardback on October 1, 2009 in Great Britain.
[9] 'Beginners' also appears in a new Library of America edition collecting all of Carver's short fiction.
Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking. When he knew the cancer would kill him, he wrote a poem about that bonus of 10 years, called "Gravy."
[10]Works
Fiction
Collections
Compilations
- Where I'm Calling From (1988)
- Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993) - published to accompany Robert Altman film Short Cuts
- Collected Stories (2009) - complete short fiction including Beginners
Poetry
Collections
- Near Klamath (1968)
- Winter Insomnia (1970)
- At Night The Salmon Move (1976)
- Fires (1983)
- Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985)
- Ultramarine (1986)
- A New Path To The Waterfall (1989)
Compilations
- In a Marine Light: Selected Poems (1988)
- All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996)
Screenplays
- Dostoevsky (1985, with Tess Gallagher)
Films and theatre adaptations
Music
- The 1989 album So Much Water So Close to Home by Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, includes a track "Everything's Turning to White" which is a re-telling of Carver's story So Much Water So Close to Home.
- The 2004 EP by Owen includes a song titled Gazebo, named after Carver's short story. The song mentions Carver's name, and also quotes the final line of Gazebo; "In this too, she was right."
- The 2005 album Pocket Revolution by dEUS includes a song titled "What We Talk About (When We Talk About Love)".
Books and articles about Carver
- Carver, Maryann Burk (2006). What It Used to Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-33258-0.
- Nesset, Kirk (1995). Stories Of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. Ohio University Press. ISBN 0821411004.
- Charles McGrath (October 28, 2007). "I,
Editor Author". Week in Review, New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/weekinreview/28mcgrath.html. Retrieved 2007-10-28. - Pieters, Jesús (2004). El silencio de lo real: sentido, comprensión e interpretación en la narrativa de Raymond Carver. Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana. ISBN 9789800112199.
- Stull, William L. and Gentry, Marshall Bruce (editors) (1990). Conversations With Raymond Carver (Literary Conversations Series). University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 0878054499.
- Stull, William L. and Carroll, Maureen P. (editors) (1993). Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography of Raymond Carver. Capra Press. ISBN 0884963705.
- Runyon, Randolph Paul (1994). Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 9780815626312.
- Kleppe, Sandra Lee and Miltner, Robert (editors) (2008). New Paths to Raymond Carver; Critical Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 9781570037245.
- Halpert, Sam (1995). Raymond Carver. An Oral Biography. University of Iowa Press. ISBN 0-87745-502-3.
- Sklenicka, Carol (Nov 2009). Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. Scribner. ISBN 978-0-7432-6245-3.
- The novel Name Your Poison: A Max Mitchum Mystery, by Lucas Stensland, was a comical attempt by the author to combine the styles of "the two Raymonds": Carver and Chandler. The book was intended to be a tribute.
- Ródenas, Gabri (2009), “Jarmusch y Carver: Se ha roto el frigorífico” in Fernández, P. (Ed.), Rompiendo moldes: Discursos, género e hibridación en el siglo XXI. Zamora/Sevilla: Editorial Comunicación Social. ISBN 978-84-96082-88-5. Available at Google Books.
References
- ^ a b c Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. New York: Scribner, 2009
- ^ What It Used To Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver, St. Martin's Press (July 11, 2006)
- ^ King, Steven. "Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories," The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2009
- ^ David Wiegand, "Serendipitous stay led writer to Raymond Carver," San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 2009
- ^ The Carver Chronicles
- ^ The Real Carver: Expansive or Minimal?
- ^ For further details of the extent of the original editing, see Blake Morrison, [1] and ‘Carved up, or kindly cut?’ by James Ley, [2]
- ^ And re-edited by William Stull and Maureen Carroll
- ^ Beginners, London, Jonathan Cape, 2009
- ^ Ebert, Roger (October 22, 1993). "Short Cuts". Chicago Sun-Times. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=REVIEWS01&TITLESearch=Short%20Cuts&ToDate=20101231. Retrieved 2010-01-05.
External links
- Gies, Martha. Raymond Carver in the Oregon Encyclopedia
- Mona Simpson, Lewis Buzbee (Summer 1983). "Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/the-art-of-fiction-no-76-raymond-carver.
- Koehne, David (1978). "Echoes of Our Own Lives; An interview with Raymond Carver". http://www.sophieswoods.com/carver.html.
- Yardley, Jonathan (2006). "Raymond Carver's first wife remembers the influential American writer.". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/13/AR2006071301020.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns. A review of Maryann Burk Carver's What It Used To Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver
- King, Stephen (2009). "Raymond Carver's Life and Stories". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/books/review/King-t.html?_r=1. A review of Raymond Carver A Writer's Life by Carol Sklenicka and Raymond Carver Collected Stories edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
- Hansen, Ron (2009). "Ron Hansen reviews the biography and short stories of Raymond Carver". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121101707.html. A review of Raymond Carver A Writer's Life by Carol Sklenicka and Raymond Carver Collected Stories edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
- Polsgrove, Carol (2009). "A Conversation on Raymond Carver". http://carolpolsgrove.com/interview/. Historian Carol Polsgrove interviews Carver biographer Carol Sklenicka
- Myers, D. G. (1998). "Between Stories: A Memoir of Raymond Carver". Philosophy and Literature. http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/myers/between_stories.htm.
- Gaby Wood (27 September 2009). "Raymond Carver: the kindest cut". The Observer. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/27/raymond-carver-editor-influence.
- Rights Battle Brews over Un-Edited Carver Stories, All Things Considered, January 7, 2008
- Carversite Features story, video, photographs, poems, quotations, bibliography, more
- An indepth interview from 1985 in which Carver talks about his father, his early writing, his characters, and the 'dark humour' in some of his stories.
- The Raymond Carver Page
- [3] Little Things short story by Raymond Carver
- The International Raymond Carver Society
- The Raymond Carver Review
- Map of Port Angeles marked with Carver's 'haunts' such as the Odyssey Bookshop
- Tell it All this review site for the posthumously published Tell it All, provides numerous links to Carver sites on the web and links to his work
- Manga and Minimalism: The Shared Visions of Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Raymond Carver
