RAYMOND CARVER

Raymond Carver (I938-I988) grew up in a logging town in Oregon where his father worked in a sawmill and his mother held odd jobs. After graduating from high school, Carver married at the age of nineteen and had two children. Working hard to support his wife, and family, he managed to enroll briefly in 1958 as a student at Chico State College in California, where he took a creative writing course from a then unknown young novelist named John Gardner. Carver remembered that he decided to try to become a writer because he liked to read pulp novels and magazines about hunting and fishing. He credited Gardner for giving him a strong sense of direction as a writer:

In 1963 Carver received his BA degree from Humboldt State College in northern California . The following year he studied writing at the University of Iowa . But the I960s were difficult for him and his wife.

Carver's desire to be a writer was so strong that he kept on writing long after the "cold facts" of his life told him he ought to quit. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was nominated for the National Book Award in 1976. Four more collections of stories followed, along with five books of  poetry, before his death from lung cancer.

Critics have noted that the rapid evolution of Carver's style causes his fiction to fall into three distinct periods. The tentative writing in his first book of  stories many of which he subsequently revised and republished -- was followed by a paring down of his prose.  This resulted in the hard-edged, detached minimalist style of his middle period, exemplified by the stories in his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (I981). In his final period, Carver developed a more expansive style, as in the collection Cathedral (1983) and the new stories in his last collection, Where I'm Calling From (1988), from which Errand is taken.

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