Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver, an American poet and short story writer, was born in Clatskanie, Oregon on May 25, 1938. He was born into a financially struggling family, with his father being a sawmill worker from Arkansas and his mother working as a retail clerk and waitress. Carver's childhood experiences were marked by his father's heavy drinking and fishing, and his mother's periodic employment.

In his early years, Carver married at the age of 19 and took on a series of menial jobs while pursuing his own career of "full-time drinking as a serious pursuit." Despite his struggles, he saw an opportunity for change when he enrolled in a writing program under author John Gardner in 1958. Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, Carver pioneered a precisionist realism, becoming a leading figure in the American short story movement during the 1980s. His stories, often set in trailer parks and shopping malls, depicted banal lives that turned on seemingly insignificant details. Carver's writing is characterized by its meticulous economy, bringing life into focus in a way similar to the paintings of Edward Hopper.

Carver's career as a writer took off in 1976 with the publication of his collection "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" This was also the year he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his first marriage. In 1977, he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period, he wrote three collections of stories, including "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Cathedral," and "Elephant." He also published several collections of poetry, including "Fires" in 1985 and "A New Path to the Waterfall" in 1988. Unfortunately, Carver's battle with alcohol had already taken its toll on his health, work, and family, leading to the end of his first marriage in 1978. He finally married Gallagher in Reno, Nevada, less than two months before he lost his fight with cancer.