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Appreciative of Anne Tyler's description of him as a "spendthrift," Raymond Carver said during an interview with Kasia Boddy (in Conversations with Raymond Carver, 1990), "I think a writer ought to spend himself in whatever he's doing. If a writer starts holding back, that can be a very bad thing. I've always squandered." Selecting Ernest Hemingway, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov as models for craft, passion, and integrity, Carver drew upon a "bedrock honesty," according to his friend Tobias Wolff (in DLB Yearbook: 1988 ), to deliver "the news from one world to another." Deemed a spokesperson for blue-collar despair, Carver wrote with the authenticity of experience. His obsessions (Carver disapproved of the word themes) included male-female relationships, confronting loss, and survival. Spanning twelve years, his four major short-story collections, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please" (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Where I'm Calling From (1988), underscore his desire in style and subject matter to create the feeling that, as he told Boddy, "things are at risk."
In his early stories unbearable ordinariness afflicts the characters.
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