17 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988)“Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on!” is how Raymond Carver (1938–1988) has
described the “unmistakable signature” of his writing. Acknowledged as a writer
who helped rescue the short story as an art form from its extensive lull, Carver
is considered the most influential American short-story writer since Ernest
Hemingway. Carver’s style is marked by precision of language and realistic,
often stark, description. He drew inspiration for his fiction from life; his char-
acters’ bouts with alcoholism, financial struggles, and destructive relationships
parallel his own. Although Carver began to concentrate on poetry late in his
career—publishing six collections of poetry during his lifetime, including Where
Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985) and Ultramarine (1986)—he was
best known for his short fiction, published in six collections during his lifetime.
One of these, Cathedral (1984), was nominated for both a National Book Award
and a Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include a National Endowment for the
Arts Discovery Award (1970), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1978), a Wallace E.
Stegner Fellowship (1972), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
for fiction (1980). He taught at numerous institutions, including the Iowa Writers
Workshop; the Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara campuses of the Univer-
sity of California; and Syracuse University and was a Distinguished Writer-in-
Residence at the University of Texas, El Paso. In May 1988 Carver was inducted
into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Raymond Clevie Carver was born on 25 May 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon,
on the Columbia River, where his father, Clevie Raymond “C. R.” Carver, worked
in a sawmill, and his mother, Ella Casey Carver, worked as a waitress and sales
clerk. His parents struggled economically, and Carver’s early life was marked by
his father’s alcoholism and domestic violence. In 1942 Carver’s family moved to
Yakima, Washington, where he grew up hunting, fishing, and reading Mickey
Spillane novels and magazines such as Sports Af ield and Outdoor Life. Soon after
graduating from Davis High School in 1956, Carver followed his father to Cali-
fornia to work in a sawmill. In June 1957 Carver married his sixteen-year-old
high-school sweetheart, Maryann Burk, and moved them both to California.
Their first child, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957 at the same
hospital where Carver’s father was being treated for alcoholism. A son, Vance
Lindsay, was born the next year. With a wife and family to support, he worked
a series of “crap jobs”— custodian, deliveryman, dictionary salesman, and library
assistant. Scenes from his family life permeate Carver’s fiction. “Distance,” for
example, reflects the divide growing between the couple because of parental
responsibilities; “Chef ’s House” mirrors their attempts at reconciliation; and “The
Bath,” later rewritten and retitled “A Small, Good Thing,” elaborates an accident
in which his daughter was hit by a car.
In 1958 Carver began taking classes at Chico State College in California,
where he enrolled in a creative-writing course taught by John Gardner, who
remained a major influence; Carver later admitted he “had felt Gardner looking