Hilary Siebert

By the time of his death at age fifty in 1988, Raymond Carver had established a prominent position as a distinctive writer of short stories known for their restrained prose and their focus on the lives of ordinary blue-collar Americans. Born Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr., in Clatskanie, Oregon, he was the first of two sons. His parents, Ella Beatrice Casey and Clevie Raymond Carver, lived a difficult life marked by poverty, alcoholism, and the struggles of working-class survival. In his four autobiographical essays opening the collection Fires, Carver makes it clear that in his adulthood, he fell victim to many of the same pressures his parents—and his father in particular—had faced.

Four years before Carver’s birth, his father, a “farmhand-turned–construction worker,” rode freight trains from Arkansas to Washington State in search not of dreams but of steady work, eventually finding employment in the sawmills of Oregon and Washington. After years of struggle, amid the pressures of work and family, alcohol came to dominate his life (“My Father’s Life,” in Fires 13–14).

Yet it was not Carver’s childhood that affected him so much as his adulthood that followed his father’s patterns: transience, low-paying jobs, bill collectors, and, finally, alcoholism. As Carver explains it, the biggest influences on his writing took place after he was twenty (“Fires,” in Fires 32). At nineteen he had married the sixteen-year-old Maryann Burk, and by October of his twentieth year they had two children. After working with his father in a sawmill and then on his own as a deliveryman, Carver borrowed money to move his family and in-laws to Paradise, California, where he began part-time study at Chico State College. It was his good fortune to enroll in Creative Writing 101 with John Gardner, an unpublished writer at the time, who cultivated Carver’s enthusiasm for writing short fiction. Carver’s first published story, “The Furious Seasons,”

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