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Awards and memorials: Carver was nominated for the National Book Award for his first major-press collection, «Will You Please Be Quiet, Please» in 1977 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his third major-press collection, Cathedral (1984), the volume generally perceived as his best. Included in the latter collection are the award-winning stories «A Small, Good Thing», and «Where I’m Calling From». John Updike selected the latter for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. For his part, Carver perceived Cathedral as a watershed in his career for its shift toward a more optimistic and confidently poetic style amid the diminution of Lish’s literary influence.[15] Carver won five O. Henry Awards with «Are These Actual Miles» (originally titled «What Is It?») (1972), «Put Yourself in My Shoes» (1974), «Are You A Doctor?» (1975), «A Small, Good Thing» (1983), and «Errand» (1988).
In Carver’s birth town of Clatskanie, Oregon, a memorial park and statue are at the corner of Lillich and Nehalem Streets, across from the library. A block away is the building where Carver was born.
«Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement.»
While establishing his reputation, Carver provided for his young family by juggling writing and jobs as a hospital porter, textbook editor, dictionary salesman, petrol station attendant and deliveryman. Later, he taught creative writing at a number of American colleges, ending up as an English professor at Syracuse University.
Carver’s first wife, Maryann Burk, was only 16 when they married and just 18 by the time their second child was born
Carver’s reputation has continued to grow since his death. His characters - beleaguered, inarticulate and weary - are living against the tide: they struggle to exist in the present, away from the future worries and past regrets that threaten to destroy them, but it is always a losing battle. And yet, no matter how chaotic the lives he delves into, Carver’s work has a dazzling lucidity. He exposes the most telling details with a surgeon’s precision and sureness of touch, and sees straight to the fragile hearts of his characters without ever becoming sentimental. His detractors criticise the strong autobiographical element to his work (alcoholism, poverty and love-turned-sour are recurrent themes), as well as the machismo of his prose style but through his unflinching attention to pain and regret he succeeds in giving the personal a universal application. As Michael Wood said of him in the New York Times, «Carver has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do. He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us.»
Shortly before his premature death from lung cancer in 1988, Carver selected his own favourites from among his stories in Where I’m Calling From. Another good place to sample the breadth of Carver’s talent is the collection Fires, which contains some of the most affecting work from all three of his forms: essays, poems and stories. In terms of themes, the strongest influences on Carver’s fiction are Chekhov, Maupassant, Richard Yates and Flannery O’Connor. Stylistically, there are echoes of Hemingway. His poetry is in the realist tradition of Robert Frost and WS Merwin. Carver is undeniably a writers’ writer. He’s been cited as an influence by authors as diverse as AL Kennedy, Haruki Murakami and Dan Rhodes. The most direct lineage in contemporary fiction can probably be traced to the work of Richard Ford but during his lifetime he was often linked with ‘dirty realists’ such as Jayne Anne Phillips; a writer for whom he often expressed admiration though stylistically their work could hardly be more different. For its depth of vision and terseness of phrase, his poetry bears comparison with Ted Hughes’s.7
Robert Altman’s Shortcuts is an irreverent Hollywood take on Carver’s work, linking together plots and characters from a number of the short stories. Carver’s battle with alcohol and the collapse of his first marriage are well documented in his own work, especially in the earlier poems and essays. His final collection of poetry, A New Path To The Waterfall, also contains moving insights into his last months. For a more systematic account see Carver Country, an intimate and revealing memoir by the poet Tess Gallagher, with whom Carver lived for 11 years and eventually married just weeks before his death.
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