Raymond Carver Books In Order

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Plays

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith Books

Publication Order of The O. Henry Prize Collection Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon on May 25, 1938 and was an American poet and short story writer. He grew up in Yakima, Washington, and was the son of Clevie Raymond Carver and Ella Beatrice Carver. His dad, who was a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a heavy drinker and a fisherman. Carver’s mom worked on and off as a retail clerk and as a waitress. He was born into a poverty stricken family right at the end of the Depression.

He was educated at local schools in Yakima. During his spare time he read mainly Mickey Spillane novels or publications like Outdoor Life and Sports Afield, and fished and hunted with his family and friends.

After he graduated from Yakima High School in the year 1956, Carver worked at a sawmill in California with his dad.

At the age of 19, he married 16 year old Maryann Burk, who’d just graduated from this private Episcopal school for girls.

He moved to Paradise, California with family in 1958 in order to be close to his mother-in-law. He took an interest in writing as he attended Chico State College, and enrolled in a creative writing class taught by John Gardner, the novelist, then a recent doctoral grad of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Raymond’s career and life.

“The Furious Seasons”, Carver’s first published story was published in 1961. It was more florid than his later work, and the tale bore the influence of William Faulkner.

He continued studying under Richard Cortez Day, a short story writer, starting in fall of 1960 at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California. He decided not to take the foreign language courses that were required by the English program and wound up receiving a BA in general studies in 1963. It was during this time that he was first published and served as the editor for Toyon, the college’s literary magazine, in which he published many of his own pieces under his own name and the pen name of John Vale.

With a B-minus average, which was exacerbated by his penchant to forsake his coursework for literary endeavors, and ballasted by Day’s sterling recommendation, Raymond got accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on a $1,000 fellowship for the 1963-1964 school year. Unable to fully adjust to the program’s upper middle class milieu and homesick for California, he completed just 12 credits out of the required 30 for the MA degree or 60 for the MFA degree.

Even though Paul Engle, program director, had awarded him a fellowship for a second year of study after Maryann Carver interceded personally and compared her husband’s plight to that of Tennessee Williams’ deleterious experience in the same program three decades prior, he decided to leave the University of Iowa at the semester’s end.

During the mid-1960s, Raymond and his family lived in Sacramento, California, where he worked at a bookstore for a short time before he took a job as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He did all of the janitorial work during the first hour and used the rest of his shift to do his writing. He audited courses at what was at that time Sacramento State College, including some workshops with Dennis Schmitz, a poet. They soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first set of poetry, called “Near Klamath”, under the guidance of Dennis.

Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and the 70s, he pioneered this precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the 80s, heading the line of so-called ‘K-mart realists’ or ‘dirty realists’. Set in shopping malls and trailer parks, they are stories about banal lives which turn on a seemingly insignificant detail. Raymond writes with a meticulous economy, all of a sudden bringing a life into a focus in a way similar to Edward Hopper’s paintings. Along with being a master of the short story, he was an accomplished poet and published numerous acclaimed volumes.

After the June 1971 publication of “Neighbors”, Carver started teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz at James B. Hall’s behest, commuting from his new home in Sunnyvale, California.

During his years of rearing children, working at miscellaneous jobs, and attempting to write, he began abusing alcohol. By his own admission, he gave up on writing and took up drinking full time. During the fall semester of 1973, he was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with John Cheever, however Raymond stated that they did much less teaching than drinking and just about no writing.

Raymond tried to simultaneously commute to Berkeley and maintain his lectureship at Santa Cruz, after he missed all but just a handful of classes because of the inherent logistical hurdles of such an arrangement and his various alcohol related illnesses. Hall gently enjoined him to resign his post. The following year after he left Iowa City, he entered a treatment facility in order to try and overcome his alcoholism, however continued drinking for three more years.

After the ‘line of demarcation’ in his life, June 2, 1977, which is the day he quit drinking, his stories became increasingly more expansive and redemptive. Alcohol had eventually shattered his work, his health, and his family, with his first marriage effectively ending in 1978. He married Tess Gallagher, his long term partner, whom he met ten years earlier at a writers’ conference in Dallas, in Reno, Nevada. It was less than two months before he would eventually lose his battle with cancer.

Raymond was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for “Cathedral”, his third major press collection. He was also nominated for the National Book Award for “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please”, his first major press collection, despite having sold under 5,000 copies the year it was released. He won the O. Henry Award five times for “Are These Actual Miles”, “Are You A Doctor”, Put Yourself in My Shoes”, “Errand”, “A Small, Good Thing”.

Raymond died on August 2, 1988 in Port Angeles, Washington of lung cancer at the age of 50.