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Common Themes In Raymond Carver's Life And Work

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Raymond Carver was a short story writer credited with reinvigorating the writing style of the short story. Raymond Carver was excellent at depicting the gritty reality that is the working poor class, largely because it was no stranger to him. Struggling with dis-ease within relationships, a life-threatening bout of alcoholism, and less-than-ideal working positions, writing was a major outlet. Writing allowed him to look at very similar situations as his from afar, almost as if it was through a movie screen. To Carver, his fiction stories held the same themes that his life did. They may have been fiction, but they described a major reality that almost anyone can relate to. Raymond Carver was born on May 25th, 1938 to Clevie Raymond Carver and …show more content…

Carver graduated from Humboldt State College four years later and began doing work at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (RAABE). His wages were not much better than what they were in his previous odd jobs, but he was now getting paid to write instead of cleaning toilets which helped further his career. In 1967, he accepted a job editing textbooks for Science Research Associates. Because of the career change, he moved his family to Palo Alto, California. In the same year, his father passed away. Carver’s first major publication consisted of a collection of his poems under the title Near Klamath (1968) ("Carver, Raymond (1939 - 1988)."), rather than the short stories that most know him for. It was around this time that Carver began to drink heavily. Three years later, he was fired from his editing job with the Science Research Associates citing the reason as having an inappropriate writing style. This same year, he had another collection of poetry published under the title Winter Insomnia (1970) ("Carver, Raymond (1939 - 1988)."). This is when his writing career started to take off. This is also when his alcohol addiction stepped up, heavily drinking for years. His first major publication of his short stories bore the title Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and was published by McGraw-Hill. Although it only sold 5,000 copies over the first year, it received a National Book Award nomination (RABBE). This was a

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Carver was born in two slaves in 1860 in Diamond, Grove, Missouri. Once he was older, he applied to a college and not only got accepted but received a scholarship. Things started to get bad when the university president found out George was a “regro”. His scholarship got withdrawn. Over the years he applied to other places and continued on with his education.

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If you wanted to change your situation in life, all you had to do was work hard in your endeavors and you could have a better life. This was what all of his books were about that he wrote. He became a very established author and wrote over 100 books, stories, and songs mainly about the “rags to riches” ordeal. There were at least 200 million copies of his books sold, which put him in the category with Stephen King. But, when he was younger, this was not the case.

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Working many unskilled jobs, he was given an opportunity to write. He joined the John Reed Club in Chicago,

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He became a club reporter for the local paper. He continued his interest in writing at the University of Colorado. He then moved to Los Angeles where his family moved after he graduated high school. His father died a year later and he took a job at a bakery to help support his family. While he worked the job, he wrote short stories, which he never found a publisher for.

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Authors of short fiction always strive to communicate a message in their stories for the reader to discover. Their message makes their story memorable and it gives the reader something to take away. Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” have very comparable messages concealed behind their stories. Although these two authors share their messages with vastly different stories, the protagonists in their stories convey similar messages for the reader to uncover. The authors of both “Cathedral” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” use the protagonist to communicate that maintaining a stubborn mindset is human nature and it takes a significant experience to change one’s way of thinking.

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III. a. Maya Angelou was an avid writer, speaker, activist and teacher. As a result of the many hardships that she suffered while growing up as a poor black woman in the south she has used her own experiences as the subject matter of her written work. In doing this she effectively shows how she was able to overcome her personal obstacles. Her autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) tells the story of her life and how she overcame and moved forward triumphantly in spite of her circumstances.

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In his letter he asked for Carver to join his team to teach the students how to plow, plant, and harvest. He stated that he could not offer a position, money, or fame but instead a hard task of bringing people up from segregation, poverty, and waste. After his masters, he accepted a position as head of the agricultural department at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington told Carver that his department was on paper and his laboratory was in his head. Although Carver only expected to stayed three or four years, he stayed at Tuskegee for 20 years where he accomplished many horticultural achievements.

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Carver was in control of the Agricultural experiment station farms. Carver made money for institute by selling farm produce. Carver didn’t enjoy some of his work, though and even complained to the institute that the letter writing and actual work is just too much. In the year 1904, Carver was reported for “lying” about produce from the chickens, and was talked to by Booker T. Washington about the issue. Carver responded by threatening to resign if they felt he was lying.

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He may be the high priest of minimalism, the genre currently so much in vogue in the writing departments, but neither in style nor subject manner does he conform to conventional definitions of the literary. His prose is sparse, terse, devoid of showy effects, stripped clean of all but the most inescapable adjectives and verbs; his subject is the daily life of the American lower middle class – the flip side, as it were, of the American dream. Yardley’s argument that Carver’s writing is “stripped clean of all but the most inescapable adjectives and verbs” is entirely true. In “Little Things,” Carver does not bog the reader down with such details as the characters’ names or backgrounds.

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