Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver has long been considered the master of economical word usage, that is, until the publication of several letters exchanged between him and his long-time fiction editor Gordon Lish revealed that his terse writings weren't nearly as terse until Lish got his hands on them. The stories that earned Carver his position as the quintessential American minimalist from the 1981 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love once ambled on for literally twice the length of the published works. Some, like "Viewfinder," even ended differently. And so it stands to reason that What We Talk About When We Talk About The Real Raymond Carver's Minimalism is not only brevity but simplicity of diction. It is also his poignant rendering of blue collar America, which owes largely to his upbringing as the child of a Northwestern saw filer and waitress. His stories about trailer park divorcees, door-to-door salesmen, and bingo nights are those of a man who began writing in correspondence classes and ducked bill collectors while living with his pregnant teenage girlfriend. Everyday Americans again spat, pigged out, and watched the boob tube in Carver's 1983 collection Cathedral, which enjoyed much critical praise. With far less editing, it reflected Carver's natural style more accurately. Cathedral proved redemptive, like its title piece, a story about a man who undergoes a religious experience watching a blind man draw a cathedral from his description of one on television. By his death just five years later, he had written four short story collections, published five poetry collections, and co-written a screenplay with his second wife Tess Gallgher called "Dostoevsky"-- quite a bit for an alleged man of few words. Whether we should or should not call Carver our greatest minimalist writer, however, we certainly may claim him as a champion of the unsung wonders of everyday America.