Raymond Carver was exposed at a young age to many of the darker aspects of family life and the working world. He was born on May 25, 1938, in Clatskanie, Oregon, into a working-class family that was dominated by his alcoholic, sometimes violent father. Carver started working immediately after high school in the same sawmill as did his father. By age 20, he had a wife, two children, and was heavily in debt. The pressures he faced climaxed when his father was admitted to a psychiatric ward in a hospital-one floor below the room in which his wife was to give birth to their second child.

In 1958, Carver enrolled part-time at Chico State College in northern California and took a literature course from then-unpublished novelist John Gardner, who would become a major influence on his writing. Carver himself commented, however, that during the first half of his career one...