Stephen King On a New Biography of Raymond Carver and a New Collection of Carver’s Writings

Posted by Kendall Harmon

This is a must-not-miss. For those of you who do not know Carver's writings, they are a real treasure--KSH.

Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.

Mrs. Carver might have had the right idea. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”: “The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.”

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-WatchBooksHistoryPoetry & Literature* International News & CommentaryAmerica/U.S.A.

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Posted November 24, 2009 at 5:39 am [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]
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