Carver, Raymond
(25 May 1938–02 August 1988)
- William L. Stull
Extract
Carver, Raymond (25 May 1938–02 August 1988), writer, was born Raymond Clevie Carver in Clatskanie, Oregon, the son of Clevie Raymond Carver, a sawmill worker, and Ella Beatrice Casey, a retail clerk and waitress. Like his “companion soul” Anton Chekhov, Carver was a child of the working poor. During the Great Depression his parents had migrated from the Arkansas dust bowl to the Pacific Northwest. Raymond, the first of their two sons, was born in a mill town of 700 on the Columbia River. In 1941 his family moved to Yakima, a hub town in the fruit lands of central Washington....
