Raymond Carver

Born Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. on May 25, 1938, in Clatskanie, Oregon, a small mill town on the lower Columbia River, Carver was the son of a sawmill worker and heavy drinker from Arkansas. The family moved to Yakima, Washington, where Carver grew up poor and married his high school girlfriend, Maryann Burk, at nineteen; by twenty, he had two children and was working a series of low-wage jobs, janitor, delivery man, sawmill laborer, while trying to write. He studied briefly with the novelist John Gardner at Chico State College in California, one of the formative encounters of his life. Through the 1960s and 1970s he published stories while struggling with severe alcoholism, which led to three hospitalizations and the collapse of his first marriage. He stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, a date he considered the beginning of his "second life." What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), its stories pared to the bone by his editor Gordon Lish, who in some cases cut over half the text without Carver's full consent, established him as the foremost practitioner of literary minimalism and was credited with reviving the American short story. Cathedral (1983), written with greater amplitude and warmth, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. In 1978 he began a relationship with the poet Tess Gallagher, who became his partner and, in June 1988, his second wife. He died of lung cancer on August 2, 1988, in Port Angeles, Washington, at fifty. His epitaph reads: "And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did."

On the night of July 8, 1980, Carver read Gordon Lish's edit of his second collection and panicked. Lish had cut it by more than half, renamed ten stories, rewritten fourteen endings. Newly sober and terrified, Carver wrote begging him to halt production. Lish printed it anyway, and the book made Carver famous.