Raymond Carver example essay topic

Tormented by tragedies, illnesses, and familial tribulations, authors and poets over the ages have reflected their angst and sadness through their works. Their emotions paint colorful characters onto a canvas of paper to portray plots that keep us glued page after page. Their own souls are poured out so that they can relay their feelings as if these fictional stories are their own. Raymond Carver is no different. Born in Clatskanie, Oregon on May 25, 1938, Carver's father immediately had a negative impact on his life by never being there for his son and when he was, he was usually drunk and abusive to Carver.

His mother also worked long hours as a waitress or as a retail clerk so he was often left at home to look after his siblings while his parents worked. By the time he was 19, Carver was married to his first wife, 16-year-old high school girlfriend Maryann Burk who was pregnant with their first child by the time she graduated from an Episcopalian private school for girls. Carver was only 21 by the time their second child was born. Once he had finished high school, he supported his family by working mediocre paying jobs such as a janitor, gas station attendant, and deliveryman.

Maryann worked for the telephone company. Hard times were ahead as money became thin and his marriage to Maryann began to disintegrate and Carver became an alcoholic. He never thought that a day would come where he would find himself a "helpless drunk". After moving his family around the country, he found himself in Iowa at Hun gate University. "Alcohol became a problem. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit".

After working with John Cheever in a writer's workshop in the fall of 1973, they found themselves doing nothing but drinking. Cheever took himself to a treatment center, but Carver continued with his addiction to alcohol. In June of 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, Carver quit drinking and his stories that he had been working on became more and more expansive, but it was too late to save his relationship with Maryann and their marriage ended in the fall of 1977. Later in 1988, however, Carver married his longtime partner, poet Tess Gallagher.

They had met 10 years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas. Two months later on August 2, 1988, the author died of lung cancer. Raymond Carver received many awards for his works and was highly esteemed among fellow writers. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979; awarded grants twice from the National Endowment for the Arts; received Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award in 1983, which gave him $35,000 per year, tax free, requiring that he give up any other job than writing; in 1988 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and awarded Doctorate of Letters from University of Hartford; and received a Brandeis Citation fro fiction in 1988. He will be long remembered as a contemporary master of the short story, and his work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Although his stories are mostly known for their knowledge of lower class society, Carver once said that, until he read critics' reviews, he didn't really think that his characters could be pitied: "I never felt the people I was writing about were so bad off.".