Who Was Raymond Carver?
Raymond Carver was the master of American minimalist fiction — the writer whose short stories of working-class life in the Pacific Northwest redefined what the short story could do and who rescued American fiction from the excesses of postmodern metafiction by returning it to the concrete particulars of ordinary human suffering. Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938, the son of a sawmill worker, he worked a series of manual jobs while writing and was plagued for most of his adult life by poverty and alcoholism.
His major collections — Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), and Cathedral (1983) — are among the most influential bodies of short fiction produced in the second half of the twentieth century. His style — spare, precise, eschewing explanation and resolution, trusting the specific detail to carry the weight of meaning — was imitated so widely that “Carveresque” became a recognizable adjective in literary criticism.
Carver is significant for TLA because his fiction attends to the lives of people whom American culture has largely decided are not worth attending to — the working poor, the alcoholic, the couple whose marriage is failing — and renders them with a precision and a dignity that constitutes, whatever Carver’s own beliefs, a form of the imago Dei in practice.
In Their Own Words
“It is possible to write about commonplace things and endow them with immense power.”
— On Writing“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
— attributed“No cheap tricks, please. Clarity and precision.”
— attributedSelected Bibliography
- Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? — 1976
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love — 1981
- Cathedral — 1983
- Where I'm Calling From — 1988 — selected stories
- A New Path to the Waterfall — 1989 — poetry, posthumous
Leave a Comment
No comments yet. Be the first to respond.