Raymond Carver

American short-story writer and poet, a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s. Carver's reputation continued to grow after his death at the age of fifty. Robert Altman's much praised film Short Cuts (1993) was based on several of Carver's stories. His short fiction is often placed in the realistic tradition of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway and its post-modern version, called minimalism. Carver himself did not like the label, because it "smacks of smallness of vision and execution."