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A Writer's Life
Scribner
December 2009
On Sale: November 24, 2009
592 pages
ISBN: 074326245X
EAN: 9780743262453
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Raymond Carver was the most beloved American short-story
writer of the late twentieth century. Two decades after his
death, this definitive biography tells the story of Carver's
uncanny ambition, legendary life, and enduring work. When Raymond Carver died at age fifty, readers lost a
distinctive voice in its prime. Carver was, the Times of
London said, "the Chekhov of middle America." His influence
on a generation of writers and on the short story itself has
been widely noted. Not so generally known are how Carver
became a writer, how he suffered to achieve his art, and how
his trou-bled and remarkable personality affected those
around him. Carol Sklenicka's meticulous and absorbing biography
re-creates Carver's early years in Yakima, Washington, where
he was the nervous, overweight son of a kindly,
alcohol-dependent lumbermill worker. By the time he was
nineteen, Ray had married his high school sweetheart,
Maryann Burk. From a basement apartment where they were
raising their first child and expecting their second, they
determined that Ray would become a writer. Despite the
handicaps of an erratic education and utter lack of
financial resources, he succeeded. Maryann's belief in Carver's talent was unshakable, as was
her willingness to support the family and see her
experiences transformed in his fiction. Sklenicka reveals
the entwined histories of this passionate, volatile marriage
and Carver's career. She describes his entry into the
literary world via "little magazines" and the Iowa Writers'
Workshop; his publication by Esquire editor Gordon Lish and
their ensuing relationship; his near-fatal alcoholism, which
worsened even as he produced many of the unforgettable
stories collected in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The biography
also depicts Carver's warmhearted friendships with scores of
writers, including Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, John Gardner,
Joy Williams, Al Young, William Kittredge, Leonard Michaels,
Chuck Kinder, and Hayden Carruth. Sklenicka shows how his
stories about unemployment, drinking, marital trauma,
divorce, troubled children, and suburban malaise, dubbed
"minimalist" by critics, won readers with their precise and
humane portrayal of ordinary lives. She examines the
dissolution of his first marriage and his partnership with
poet Tess Gallagher, who helped him enjoy the full measure
of his success. Ever grateful that he'd been able to
renounce alcohol, Carver shunned pity and considered himself
a "lucky man" as he faced death from lung cancer in 1988. Carol Sklenicka draws on hundreds of interviews with people
who knew Carver, prodigious research in libraries and
private collections, and all of Carver's poems and stories
for Raymond Carver, which took ten years to write. Her
portrait is generous and wise without swerving from
discordant issues in Carver's private affairs. Above all
Sklenicka shows how Carver's quintessentially American life
fostered the stories that knowing readers have cherished
from their first publication until the present day.
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