This page by a Carver fan includes biographical and bibliographical information, along with a useful list of scholarly books on Carver.

BIOGRAPHY
Raymond Carver (1938-1988) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, the son of a sawmill worker and a mother who did odd jobs. He graduated from high school at eighteen and was married and the father of two children before he was twenty.

The following years were difficult as he struggled to develop a writing career while supporting a family. While at Chico State College (now California State University, Chico), Carver took a creative writing course that profoundly affected him. He went on to earn a B.A. degree (1963) from Humboldt State College in Eureka and spent the following year studying writing at the University of Iowa. As he became known, he began to lecture on English and creative writing at various universities, including the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. He taught at Goddard College in Vermont and was professor of English at Syracuse University from 1980 to 1983.

In 1983, he received the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, which allowed him for the next five years to devote himself full-time to writing. His first collection of short stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (1976), was nominated for the National Book Award. Other short story collections include What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981) and Cathedral (1984). He also published five volumes of poems, among them Near Klamath (1968), Ultramarine (1986), and A New Path to the Waterfall (1989), his last book. During the last ten years of his life, Carver lived with the poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher, whom he married shortly before his death.