Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. 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. He saw this opportunity 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 seemingly insignificant detail. Carver writes with meticulous economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper. As well as being a master of the short story, he was an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes. After the 'line of demarcation' in Carver's life - 2 June 1977, the day he stopped drinking - his stories become increasingly more redemptive and expansive. Alcohol had eventually shattered his health, his work and his family - his first marriage effectively ending in 1978. He finally married his long-term parter Tess Gallagher (they met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas) in Reno, Nevada, less than two months before he eventually lost his fight with cancer.
Series
Books
Ultramarine
Poems
1986
Where I'm Calling From
1988
Vitamins
1981
All of Us
The Collected Poems
1996
Antología del cuento norteamericano
2002
A Small, Good Thing
1981
Cathedral
1983
American Masters
The Short Stories of Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and John Updike
1998
At night the salmon move
1976
Een kleine weldaad
alle verhalen
2023
Fires
Essays, Poems, Stories
1977
Furious Seasons and Other Stories
1976
The Stories of Raymond Carver
1985
فاصله و داستانهای دیگر
2001
Collectors
2023
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
Fifty North American Stories Since 1970
1999
Tell the Women We're Going
1981
Carver Country
The World of Raymond Carver
1990
خوبیِ خدا
2006
Feathers
1983
Elephant and Other Stories
1988
صدای سوم
گزیدهداستانهای نویسندگان نسل سوم آمریکا
2008
In a Marine Light
Selected Poems
1987
Little Things
An Anthology of Poetry
2013
No Heroics, Please
1992
Short Cuts
1993
Put yourself in my shoes
1974
Where Water comes Together with Other Water
1985
Poems by Raymond Carver
1996
Winter Insomnia
1970
Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets
2016
So Much Water, So Close to Home
1989
Why Don't You Dance?
1981
Birthday Stories
Selected and Introduced by Haruki Murakami
2004
پاکت ها و چند داستان دیگر
2025
Collected Stories
1985
Beginners
2009
The Father
2023
لاتاری، چخوف و داستانهای دیگر
2007
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love / Beginners
2015
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
1976
Popular Mechanics
1977
Limonata e altri racconti
2011
Good Poems for Hard Times
2005
Il mestiere di scrivere
esercizi, lezioni, saggi di scrittura creativa
1988
Call If You Need Me
The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose
2000
A New Path to the Waterfall
1989
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
1981
Fat
1971
American Gothic Tales
1996
