Raymond Carver

Aliki Varvogli (University of Dundee)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 25 May 1938
Died 2 Aug 1988
Activity 1961-1988

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Essayist
Poet
Story-writer

Resources

Carver's Works

Save to Bookshelf

Raymond Carver was born in unpromising circumstances in Clatskanie, Oregon on 25 May 1938. His father, Clevie Raymond Carver, worked in a sawmill while his mother, Ella Beatrice Casey, was a waitress and retail clerk. The family moved to Yakima, Washington when Carver was three years old, and by the time he was eighteen he had moved with his father to Chester, California to work in a sawmill himself. Poverty, domestic violence and his father's alcoholism dominated Carver's early life and this unhappy background, and the places where young Raymond grew up, would later dominate his own fiction. Father and son returned to Yakima in 1957, which proved a defining year in Carver's life. Still only nineteen, he married the sixteen-year-old Maryann Burk, and the first of their two children was…

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1482 words

Citation: Varvogli, Aliki. "Raymond Carver". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 July 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=770, accessed 25 November 2024.]