Carver, Raymond 1939-88
US poet and short-story writer

Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, he married at 18 and struggled for many years to provide for a young family and further his career as a writer. He also fought against chronic alcoholism. Although he published a number of small-press books of poetry and one chapbook of fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was not until the publication of the collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) that his work began to reach a wider audience. Both his fiction and his poetry are remarkable for their spare narratives, focusing on the lower and middle classes and dealing with states of transition: couples breaking up, people between jobs. He wrote no novels. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979 and was twice awarded grants by the National Endowment for Arts. He taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Texas and the University of California. Other books include Fire: Essays, Poems, Stories (1984), Elephant and Other Stories (1988), and the poetry collections: Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985) and Ultramarine (1985, published in Great Britain as In A Marine Light: Selected Poems).