Raymond Carver

8 Pages 1938 Words

Ring,' in Targets. He continues his studies and receives his B.A. in 1963 at the University of Iowa. During these years, working in different jobs, rising kids, and trying to write, Carver started to drink. "Alcohol became a problem. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit." (Meyer 29) In 1967 his story “Will you Please be Quiet, Please?” was selected for the anthology Best American Short Stories. At this time, Carver was a teacher in the Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop with John Cheever, but later he said that they did nothing but drink. Living the life like so many of his characters, the down-and-out characters he wrote about, Carver drowned his problems in alcohol. In June 2, 1977 Carver stopped drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. He divorced Maryann in 1982 but had been living with poet Tess Gallagher since 1979. Carver had met Tess at a writers conference in Dallas in November of 1977, she too was a child of an alcoholic father, and a survivor of a broken marriage. Carver and Gallagher lived and worked together writing over twenty-five books between them over ten years. They eventually married in 1988 and two months later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died of lung cancer. (Meyer 30-32)
In his career as a writer, Carver received several awards, among them The National Endowment for t...