Raymond carver biography online free

Raymond Carver, acclaimed author of short stories and poems, was raised in Yakima by a family of working people from Arkansas. Determined from childhood to become a writer, he studied under the novelist John Gardner in college and went on to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Carver's sharp, naturalistic fiction mined the terrain of his Pacific Northwest upbringing, his family relationships, and his marriage. With his wife Maryann Burk Carver as his stalwart financial support and first reader, he began publishing his work in small literary journals in the 1960s. Later, championed by the ascendant editor Gordon Lish, Carver's stories won a national audience in magazines like Esquire. Yet by the time he released his first story collection in 1976, he had sunk into acute alcoholism, stranding his family in a state of crisis. After a series of hospitalizations, Carver took his last drink in 1977. Separated from Maryann, he began seeing the poet Tess Gallagher, who remained his partner

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The Hub

When we talk about Raymond Carver, we talk about the short story. Despite having published eight poetry collections before his death (33 years ago to the day), he’s known for works like “Cathedral” and “Why Don’t You Dance.” But, as it turns out, Carver wrote short stories out of practicality, not pure love of the form. In his 1983 Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review, Carver revealed that his short stories came about through limited time and limited patience:

INTERVIEWER
In an article you did for The New York Times Book Review you mentioned a story “too tedious to talk about here”—about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to go into that story now?

CARVER
The story that was “too tedious to talk about” has to do with a number of things that aren’t very pleasant to talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay “Fires,” which was published in Antaeus. In it I said that finally, a writer is judged by w

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Go back to the year 2000 with me, if you please.  I'm in Wilmette, IL at my parent's house, home on break from school out east, getting ready to apply to college, sitting in an armchair in the living room (designated "the library") leafing through an anthology of American literature.  I'm vaguely familiar with Raymond Carver from Roger Ebert's review of Short Cuts, which inom read a few years earlier, and I see the story "Cathedral."  I decide to read it, and it's beautiful, a sketch of a blind man being helped to draw a cathedral from an image in his mind of which he can have no reference.  It's a pretty quick read, but enormously moving, and inom decide this might be a writer worth checking out.

Fast forward a year and I'm at NYU in a Prose Composition class and our professor gives us a xeroxed copy of Carver's poem "Fear," a list poem about things he fears.  I've seen Short Cuts at least a time or two by now (even going so far as to call my favorite movi