All I know for sure it that he's my editor and my friend, and I'm glad on both counts.' Among these stories, which Lish edited, constantly cutting out talks about feelings, were 'Mr. he is remarkably smart and sensitive to the needs of a manuscript. However, in Writers at Work (1986) Carver praises Lish's skills: '. Knopf, later told that he had a crucial role in the creation of these early works, but Carver never acknowledged in public his debt to Lish. Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.' 'It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine - the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. In his prose Carver mixed the simple clarity of Chekhov with the ominous tones of Franz Kafka.

The title story was was nominated for a National Book Award. It was followed by WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE? (1976) which established his reputation. His first collection of short stories, PUT YOURSELF IN MY SHOES, appeared in 1974. Not too long after leaving Iowa City, Cheever went to a treatment center, but Carver contined drinking for some years. He was a teacher in the Iowa's Writers' Workshop in the fall semester of 1973 with John Cheever, but according to Carver they did nothing but drink. In 1967 his story 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?' was selected for the anthology Best American Short Stories, edited by Martha Foley. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit.' During these years of working crap jobs, rising kids, and trying to write, Carver started to drink. While still at Humboldt Carver published his first story, 'Pastoral,' in the Western Humanites Review, and his first poem, 'The Brass Ring,' in Targets, which also had a poem by Charles Bukowski. From 1980 to 1983 he was a professor of English at Syracuse University. Carver taught for several years in universities throughout the United States from the 1970s. in 1963, and at the University of Iowa, from which he received an M.F.A. Later he said that all his writing life 'he had felt Gardner looking over his shoulder when he wrote, approving or disapproving of certain words, phrases and strategies.'Д¬arver continued his studies first at Humboldt State College in California, receiving his B.A. He attended a creative-writing course, and was taught by John Gardner. In 1959 he moved from Oregon to Paradise, California, where he became interested in writing. Maryann worked for the telephone company. After finishing high school Carver supported his family by working as a janitor, gas-station attendant, and deliveryman. She was eighteen when her second child was born. In 1957, at the age of 19, he married his high-school girlfriend, the sixteen-year-old Maryann Burk, who was pregnant and just graduated from an Episcopalian private school for girls. Carver read mostly Mickey Spillane's novels, or Sports Afield and Outdoor Life. At home his father used to tell him stories about his grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War, for both sides.

Carver was educated at a local school in Yakima, Washington. His father was a sawmill worker, a violent alcoholic, and mother worked as a waitress or as a retail clerk or else stayed home. Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, a mill town on the Columbia River in Oregon. 'I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them and the fact - so crucially important to me back at the beginning and now still a consideration - that the story can be written and read in one sitting. Carver himself did not like the label, because it 'smacks of smallness of vision and execution.' His short fiction is often placed in the realistic tradition of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway and its post-modern version called minimalism. Robert Altman's much praised film Short Cuts (1993) was based on several of Carver's stories. Carver's reputation continued to grow after his death at the age of fifty.

American short-story writer and poet, a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.

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