Raymond Carver

Writer

Birthday May 25, 1938

Birth Sign Gemini

Birthplace Clatskanie, Oregon, U.S.

DEATH DATE 1988-8-2, Port Angeles, Washington, U.S. (50 years old)

Nationality United States

#21310 Most Popular

1938

Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet.

1943

His brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima.

In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family.

1956

After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California.

1957

In June 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls.

Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957.

Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born a year later.

Carver worked as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer, while Maryann worked as an administrative assistant, high school English teacher, salesperson, and waitress.

1958

Carver moved to Paradise, California, with his family in 1958 to be close to his mother-in-law.

He became interested in writing while attending Chico State College and enrolled in a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, then a recent doctoral graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career.

1960

Carver continued his studies under the short story writer Richard Cortez Day (like Gardner, a recent PhD alumnus of the Iowa program) beginning in autumn 1960 at Humboldt State College in Arcata.

In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family resided in Sacramento, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital.

He did all of the janitorial work in the first hour and then wrote through the rest of his shift.

He audited classes at what was then Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz.

Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first book of poems, Near Klamath, under Schmitz's guidance.

1961

In 1961, Carver's first published story, "The Furious Seasons", appeared.

More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner.

"Furious Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and is part of the collection, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.

1963

He chose not to take the foreign language courses required by the English program and received a B.A. in general studies in 1963.

During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the college's literary magazine, in which he published several of his own pieces under his own name as well as the pseudonym John Vale.

With his B-minus average, exacerbated by his penchant to forsake coursework for literary endeavors, ballasted by a sterling recommendation from Day, Carver was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop on a $1,000 fellowship for the 1963–1964 academic year.

Homesick for California and unable to fully adjust to the program's upper middle class milieu, he only completed 12 credits out of the 30 required for a M.A. degree or 60 for the M.F.A. degree.

Although program director Paul Engle awarded him a fellowship for a second year of study after Maryann Carver personally interceded and compared her husband's plight to Tennessee Williams' deleterious experience in the program three decades earlier, Carver decided to leave the University of Iowa at the end of the semester.

1966

According to biographer Carol Sklenicka, Carver falsely claimed to have received an M.F.A. from Iowa in 1966 on later curricula vitae.

1967

1967 was a landmark year for Carver with the appearance of "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"

in Martha Foley's annual Best American Short Stories anthology and the impending publication of Near Klamath by the English Club of Sacramento State College.

He briefly enrolled in the library science graduate program at the University of Iowa that summer but returned to California following the death of his father.

1968

Following a 1968 sojourn to Israel, the Carvers relocated to San Jose, California; as Maryann finished her undergraduate degree, he continued his graduate studies in library science at San Jose State through the end of 1969 before failing once again to take a degree.

1970

Maryann, who postponed completing her education to support her husband's educational and literary endeavors, eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.

Shortly thereafter, the Carvers relocated to Palo Alto, California, so he could take his first white-collar job, at Science Research Associates, a subsidiary of IBM in nearby Menlo Park, California, where he worked intermittently as a textbook editor and public relations director through 1970.

1974

After completing graduate work at Stanford, she briefly enrolled in the University of California, Santa Barbara's English doctoral program when Carver taught at the institution as a visiting lecturer in 1974.

1976

He published his first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, in 1976.

1981

His breakout collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), received immediate acclaim and established Carver as an important figure in the literary world.

1983

It was followed by Cathedral (1983), which Carver considered his watershed and is widely regarded as his masterpiece.

1988

The definitive collection of his stories, Where I'm Calling From, was published shortly before his death in 1988.

1989

In their 1989 nomination of Carver for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the jury concluded, "The revival in recent years of the short story is attributable in great measure to Carver's mastery of the form."

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Ella Beatrice Carter (née Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver.

His father, a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and a heavy drinker.

Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk.