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Raymond Carver biography
Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (1938-1988) was born in a mill town in Oregon. The son of a sawmill worker, Carver experienced firsthand what life was like for the lower middle class. He married a year after finishing high school and had two children by the age of 20. In order to make ends meet, Carver worked as janitor, sawmill laborer, library assistant, and delivery man.
In 1958, he became extremely interested in writing after taking a creative writing class at Chico State College. In 1961, Carver published his first short story "The Furious Seasons". He continued to pursue his literary studies at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, where he got his B.A. in 1963. During his time at Humboldt, Carver was the editor for Toyon, his college's literary magazine, and his short stories began to be published in various magazines.
Carver's first success as a writer came in 1967. His short story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" was included in Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories anthology, gaining him recognition in literary circles. He began work as a textbook editor in 1970, which was the first time he had a white-collar job.
Carver worked blue-collared jobs (like as a sawmill laborer) for much of his life, which influenced his writing pixabay
His father was an alcoholic, and Carver began drinking heavily in 1967 shortly following his father's death. Throughout the 1970s, Carver was repeatedly hospitalized for alcoholism. In 1971, his publication of "Neighbors" in the June issue of Esquire magazine earned him a teaching position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He took another teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972. The stress of the two positions coupled with his alcohol-related illnesses caused him to resign his position at Santa Cruz. He went to a treatment center the next year but didn't stop drinking until 1977 with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
His drinking caused problems in his marriage. In 2006, his first wife released a memoir that detailed her relationship with Carver. In the book, she details how his drinking led to him cheating, which led to more drinking. While she was attempting to earn her Ph.D., she was constantly set back by her husband's illness:
"By fall of '74, he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the Ph.D. program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes"²
Alcohol is a force that has haunted many great writers throughout history. Edgar Allen Poe, along with some of America's best-loved authors were alcoholics, including Nobel Prize winners William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck—four of the six total Americans who had won a Novel Prize for Literature at the time.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “first you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."³ Many psychiatrists today speculate that famous writers drink to cure loneliness, increase their self-confidence, and stave off the burden placed on the creative mind. Some writers, like Hemingway, drank as a sign of their masculinity and capability, while actually masking their unaddressed mental health issues.
Although many writers used alcohol as a crutch, it was often detrimental to their health and even their careers. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe, Ring Lardner, and Jack Kerouac all died in their forties from alcohol-related issues. For Carver, drinking almost made him lose his teaching career because he was too sick and hungover to get to work. For most of the 70s, his writing took a massive hit as he stated he spent more time drinking than writing.
In 1978, Carver got a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso after falling in love with the poet Tess Gallagher at a writer's conference in Dallas the previous year. In 1980 Carter and his mistress moved to Syracuse, where he worked as a professor in the English department at Syracuse University and was appointed the coordinator for the creative writing program.
In addition to his poetry and short stories, Carver made a living teaching creative writing, pixabay.
Much of his most famous works were written in the 1980s. His short-story collections include What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Where I’m Calling From (1988). His poetry collections include At Night the Salmon Move (1976), Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985), and Ultramarine (1986).
Carver and his first wife divorced in 1982. He married Tess Gallagher in 1988, six weeks before he died of lung cancer. He is buried in Port Angeles, Washington at Ocean View Cemetery.
Raymond Carver short stories
Carver published several collections of short stories during his lifetime. His most famous collections of short stories include: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (first published 1976), Furious Seasons and Other Stories (1977), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), and Cathedral (1983). "Cathedral" and "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" are also the names of two of Carver's most popular short stories.
Raymond Carver: "Cathedral" (1983)
"Cathedral" is arguably one of Carver's most popular short stories. The short story starts when the narrator's wife tells her husband that her blind friend, Robert, will be spending the night with them. The narrator's wife used to work reading for Robert ten years before. The narrator is immediately jealous and judgmental, suggesting they should take him bowling. The narrator's wife chastises his insensitivity, reminding her husband that Robert's wife has just died.
The wife picks up Robert at the train station and brings him home. All throughout dinner the narrator is rude, barely engaging in the conversation. After dinner he turns on the TV while Robert and his wife are talking, annoying his wife. When she goes upstairs to get changed, Robert and the narrator listen to the TV program together.
When the program starts talking about cathedrals, Robert asks the narrator to explain a cathedral to him. The narrator does, and Robert asks him to draw a cathedral, putting his hand over the narrator's so he can feel the movements. The narrator gets lost in the drawing and has an existential experience.
The narrator and his wife's blind guest bond over cathedrals, pixabay
Raymond Carver: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (1981)
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is another one of Carver's famous short stories. It deals with conflicts between ordinary people. In this short story, the narrator (Nick) and his new wife, Laura, are at their married friends' house drinking gin.
The four of them begin talking about love. Mel, who is a cardiologist, argues that love is spiritual, and he used to be in the seminary. Terry, his wife, says that before she married Mel she was in love with a man named Ed, who was so in love with her he tried to kill her and eventually killed himself. Mel argues that wasn't love, he was just crazy. Laura asserts that her and Nick know what love is. The group finishes the bottle of gin and starts in on a second one.
Mel says he's witnessed true love at the hospital, where an elderly couple got in a horrific accident and almost died. They survived, but the man was depressed because he couldn't see his wife in his cast. Mel and Terri bicker throughout the story and Mel asserts he wants to call his kids. Terri tells him he can't because then he'd have to talk to his ex wife, who Mel says he wishes he could kill. The group keeps drinking until its dark outside and Nick can hear everyone's heart beat.
The narrator and his friends discuss the nature of love while getting drunk on gin, pixabay
Raymond Carver's poems
Carver's poetry reads a lot like his prose. His collections include Near Klamath (1968), Winter Insomnia (1970), At Night The Salmon Move (1976), Fires (1983), Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985), Ultramarine (1986), and A New Path To The Waterfall (1989). One of Carver's most famous poetry collection was A Path To the Waterfall, published a year after his death.
Like his prose, Carver's poetry finds meaning in the every day lives of ordinary, middle-class people. "The Best Time of the Day" focuses on human connection in the midst of a demanding life. "Your Dog Dies" examines how art can take away the sting of loss and morality. 'What the Doctor Said' (1989) is about a man who just found out he has tumors on his lungs and will inevitably die from it. Carver's poetry examines the most mundane parts of everyday life and scrutinizes it until he discovers some truth about the human condition.
Raymond Carver: Quotes
Carver's works keenly reflect the human need for connection, while also focusing on how relationships collapse in on themselves. Carver's style is sometimes called dirty realism, where the mundane intersects with a dark reality. Carver writes about marriages dissolving, alcohol abuse, and loss in the working class. His quotes reflect the themes of his works:
“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
This quote consists of the last two sentences of Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." It describes the way humans are drawn to connect with one another, despite disagreements, misunderstandings, and poor circumstances. Though all four of the characters disagree about love on the surface level and all have inevitably faced some kind of trauma at the hands of love, their hearts beat in sync. There is an unspoken agreement between the characters that none of them truly grasp the concept of love except in how they relate to one another. Love connects them all, even though they don't understand it.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth."
This quote is the entirety of Carver's poem "Late Fragment" included in his A New Path to the Waterfall (1989) collection. Again, it speaks to the human need for connection. Love is the one thing that has given the speaker any feeling of worth as it makes him feel known. The value of being alive comes down to feeling connected, loved, and understood.
Raymond Carver - Key takeaways
- Raymond Carver is a 20th century American poet and short story writer who was born in Oregon in 1938 to a lower middle class family.
- His first short story was published while he was in college, but it wasn't until 1967 that he found notable literary success with his short story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"
- Carver is most famous for his short stories and revitalizing the genre of American short stories in the 1980s.
- His most famous collections are Cathedral and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
- His works reflects themes of human connection, relationship collapse, and the value of the mundane. Many of Carver's works center on the mundane lives of blue collar people.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Raymond Carver
Who is Raymond Carver?
Raymond Carver was a 20th century American poet and short-story writer. He is known for revitalizing the American short story genre in the 1970s and 80s.
What is 'Cathedral' by Raymond Carver about?
'Cathedral' is centered on a sighted man meeting his wife's blind friend for the first time. The narrator, who can see, is jealous of his wife's friendship and hostile to the blind man until he asks the narrator to describe a cathedral to him. The narrator is at a loss for words and feels a connection to the blind man for the first time.
What is Raymond Carver's writing style?
Carver is known for his short stories and poetry. In the foreword to his 1988 Where I'm Calling From collection, Carver described himself as "inclined toward brevity and intensity." His prose is situated in the minimalism and dirty realism movements.
What is Raymond Carver known for?
Carver is known for his short story and poetry collections. 'Cathedral' is generally considered his most well-known short story.
Did Raymond Carver win the National Book Award?
Carver was a finalist for the National Book Awards in 1977.
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