Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.
Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington. His father, a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a violent alcoholic. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.
Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life and hunted and fished with friends and family. After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June 1957, aged 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk. She had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. When their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year, Carver was 20. Carver supported his family by working as a janitor, sawmill laborer, delivery man, and library assistant. During their marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, administrative assistant, and teacher.
Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative-writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California, where he studied with Richard Cortez Day and received his B.A. in 1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the university literary magazine, in which he included several of his own pieces under pseudonyms. He later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, for one year. Maryann graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.
In the mid-1960s Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, where he worked as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He sat in on classes at what was then Sacramento State College including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver's first book of poems, Near Klamath, was published in 1968 by the English Club of Sacramento State College.
With his appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of Near Klamath, and the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year. That was also the year that he moved his family to Palo Alto, California, so that he could take a job as a textbook editor for Science Research Associates. He worked there until he was fired in 1970 for his inappropriate writing style. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at universities throughout the United States.
During the years of working in different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily and stated that alcohol became such a problem in his life that he more or less gave up and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a teacher in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Cheever went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but Carver continued drinking for three years. After being hospitalized three times (between June 1976 and February or March 1977), Carver began his 'second life' and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers' conference in Dallas, Texas in 1978. From May until August, 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, in western Washington state. In September, the two moved to Syracuse, where Gallagher had been appointed the Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University; Carver taught as a professor in the English department. He and Gallagher jointly purchased a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. In ensuing years, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that read "Writers At Work" in order to be left alone. In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced.[1] He married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Raymond Carver is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, WA.
"Cathedral" is itself a short story written by Carver. It is about a man whose wife is old friends with a blind man. The story shows the husband/narrator's distaste for the blind man who is coming to visit him and his wife for a few days. At times it seems that the man is jealous of the blind man for being so close to his wife; at other times it seems that the husband is disgusted by the man's blindness. In the end they bond in a way through the comunication they share about what a cathedral looks like.
美国小说家雷蒙德·卡佛大概怎么也不会想到,在他死了这么多年后,在离他那么远的中国,会有一群人正襟危坐钻着牛角尖儿研究他的“极简主义”:为什么用词那样简单,句子如此短小,还有巨大的沉默弥漫其中?哎呀,真是韵味无穷又想不通。在卡佛看来,这事儿特别简单。他穷,工...
評分 評分如果让我在作家中选出一个,抹去他,让他从未存在过,我会选卡佛,起码在这一刻是这样的。因为,这样我们就不需要正视自己的生活。卡佛作品里的生活,很难让人不联想到,那就是我们的生活,逼仄,贫乏,惨白,茫然,绝望悬在头顶,一触即发。连他偶尔给你的一点安慰,也像给抽...
評分就算是卡佛的短篇小说,我也能翻开某篇的前两页,再翻翻它的最后一页。然后仅仅是吃饺子的功夫,就将中间的叙述猜个七七八八。 也许只是几十年中间的一个钟头,也许只是漫长人生中间一个甚至不被主角注意到的小事。只是当某个片断出现之后,你的人生就变得“不同”了。也不是...
評分1981年2月15日,雷蒙德·卡佛在《纽约时报》一篇谈论写作的文章中写道:“有些作家很有才华,我认识的作家们没有一个缺少才华的。但要说到观察事物独特、精确的方式,以及找到合适的语境来表达这种观察方式,那就是另一回事了。《盖普眼中的世界》(The World According to Gar...
比較喜歡裏麵的Preservation和Feather,風格太強烈,如果連著讀下來如同吃齋。這本書可以齣現在畢業論文的參考書目裏瞭。
评分隻針對Cathedral一篇評
评分Carver的極簡裏藏著一種巨大的沉默,那是在生活的真實裏,小人物們無力錶達齣來的痛苦。這種痛苦要怎麼說齣來?大概隻有放到沉默裏吧。
评分當年見很多人吐槽中文譯筆之生硬,誤以為自己文字感覺有待熏陶,現在看來,挺為譯者惋惜
评分2014 reading project 進行中。
本站所有內容均為互聯網搜索引擎提供的公開搜索信息,本站不存儲任何數據與內容,任何內容與數據均與本站無關,如有需要請聯繫相關搜索引擎包括但不限於百度,google,bing,sogou 等
© 2025 qciss.net All Rights Reserved. 小哈圖書下載中心 版权所有