Raymond Carver Research Paper

Raymond Carver was born on May 25, 1938, in Clatskanie, Oregon. His father was a manual laborer, and Carver worked as a laborer at various jobs from the early 1950s through the late 1960s. In 1957, at the age of eighteen, he married sixteen-year old Maryann Burk, who eventually became a teacher, and with whom he had two children within the first two years of their marriage. They moved to California where Carver attended Humboldt State College (now California State University at Humboldt) and received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1963, while at the same time working in a sawmill to support his family. In 1966, Carver earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In 1968, he published his first

In 1976, his first major book was published, a collection of stories written between 1962 and 1975 entitled, Will You Please Be Quiet Please?. His second major collection of short stories, What We Talk When We Talk About Love, was published in 1981. In 1983, Cathedral, his third major collection was published. His fourth major story collection, Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories was published shortly before his death of lung cancer at the age of 50. Carver often portrays characters whom one reviewer describes as living, much as Carver long did, “on the edge of poverty, alcoholic self-destruction, loneliness.”. Carver’s stark, minimal narrative style, pared-down language, and episodic plot lines are particularly effective in capturing the gritty reality of his characters. Captured is the ordinary often revelatory nature of his characters’ experiences and the range of their emotions, which often include guilt, grief, hopelessness, and the effects of fading love. Nevertheless, his stories are frequently tinged with a biting humor. He is compared to such literary luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, and Anton Chekhov; and described by the New York Times as “surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the twentieth century.” The collections of stories of Raymond Carver is never enough