It’s the birthday of Raymond Carver (1938-1988), whose short stories had a huge influence on the genre during the second half of the twentieth century and whose reputation continues to loom large in spite of controversy after his death.

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, and married Maryann Burk (who was not quite 17) one year after high school. They had two children and a series of blue collar jobs; Carver took a creative writing course at Chico State College (now California State University), where he studied with the great creative writing teacher John Gardner, and became serious about being a writer. He began publishing short stories and studied at Humboldt State College (now University) in Arcata, California, graduating with a B.A. in 1963. His first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, came out in 1976 to great critical acclaim.

By then Carver had been drinking heavily for years; at one point, he’d hit his wife (who was largely supporting him) with a wine bottle in a jealous drunken rage and nearly killed her. After several hospitalizations, he started sobering up in 1977. His next collection, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, came out in 1981, edited by Gordon Lish and hugely successful. By “edited” we mean “slashed.” Carver was in agony over many of the enormous changes Lish made, but ultimately he caved, or at any rate Lish wouldn’t stop production of the book, and Carver felt under Lish’s thumb. (Stephen King, in a very interesting New York Times article which you can read right here, said as a fellow recovering alcoholic that Carver may have suffered from “people-pleasing”.) People raved about Carver’s minimalist style, but in reality it was Lish’s style imposed on Carver’s.

In 1982, Carver and Maryann were divorced; he was already living with poet Tess Gallagher. Carver’s third collection, Cathedral (1983), was more expansive and less Lish and received nominations for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. (The title story of that collection is one of Carver’s greatest; the ending soars. If you haven’t read it, rush out and do so.) Carver, who once said he was “a cigarette with a body attached to it,” died of lung cancer in 1988 at the age of 50 just weeks after marrying Gallagher.

In 2009, Gallagher managed to get a new collection of Carver’s stories published in the volume Collected Stories, which includes Carver’s original versions of the early stories Lish had heavily edited.

Have a bright, expansive Friday under nobody’s thumb and stay scrupulously honest to the data.