Raymond Carver





Raymond Carver

Author profile


born
May 25, 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon, The United States

died
August 02, 1988

gender
male

genre

influences
John Gardner, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams...more


About this author

Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. The son of a violent alcoholic, he married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit'. A career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958 and he saw this as a turning point.
Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seeminlgy...more


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Average rating: 4.27 · 31,082 ratings · 2,177 reviews · 112 distinct works
What We Talk About When We Tal...
4.31 of 5 stars 4.31 avg rating — 8,075 ratings — published 1981 — 28 editions
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Where I'm Calling From: New an...
4.42 of 5 stars 4.42 avg rating — 6,180 ratings — published 1983 — 15 editions
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Cathedral
4.34 of 5 stars 4.34 avg rating — 5,487 ratings — published 1983 — 30 editions
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Will You Please Be Quiet, Plea...
4.34 of 5 stars 4.34 avg rating — 2,926 ratings — published 1976 — 17 editions
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Short Cuts: Selected Stories
4.09 of 5 stars 4.09 avg rating — 1,635 ratings — published 1993 — 8 editions
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Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories
4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 avg rating — 583 ratings — published 1983 — 7 editions
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Call If You Need Me: The Uncol...
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4.0 of 5 stars 4.00 avg rating — 615 ratings7 editions
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All of Us: The Collected Poems
4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 avg rating — 565 ratings4 editions
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Collected Stories
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4.62 of 5 stars 4.62 avg rating — 331 ratings — published 2009
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A New Path to the Waterfall
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4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 avg rating — 330 ratings7 editions
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More books by Raymond Carver…
“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”
Raymond Carver

“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
Raymond Carver

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
Raymond Carver

Polls

Short Stuff Poll #4: Pick our March short story author

 
  18 votes, 48.6%

 
  14 votes, 37.8%

 
  5 votes, 13.5%

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