Widely considered the father of the short story form, Chekhov was perhaps the biggest literary influence of Carver's life. Critics frequently hail Carver's "Chekhovian" vision and draw attention to the parallels between the two writers' style and subject matter. William Stull, for example, writes, "Like Chekhov, Carver knew intimately the marginal lives of hardship and squalor from which he crafted luminous stories of empathy, endangerment, and hard-won affirmation." It is both fitting and ironic that "Errand" was the last story that Carver wrote before he died. Carver himself says that he was inspired to write the story after reading Troyat's account of Chekhov's death in his biography on the Russian writer. In his essay "On Errand" in No Heroics, Please, Carver writes, "I thought I saw an opportunity to pay homage—if I could bring it off,.....
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