and that takes us up only to 1977, the year Carver took his last drink.Īs brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Iowa City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Humboldt County. After that the moves accelerated: Paradise, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. In 1956, the Carvers relocated to Chester, Calif. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”: “The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.”īorn in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, Wash. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later - and seemingly without irony. Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash.
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