SOURCE: Scott, A. O. “Looking for Raymond Carver.” New York Review of Books 46, no. 13 (August 12, 1999): 52-9.

In the following essay, Carver's work and career are considered in terms of the influences of his friends, mentors and editors, and his literary reputation in relation to the tremendous good will he engendered in just about everyone he met.

“And did you get what you wanted from this life, even           so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel           myself beloved on the earth.” 

Plenty of writers are admired, celebrated, imitated, and hyped. Very few writers can, as Raymond Carver does in his poem “Late Fragment,” call themselves beloved. In the years since his death in 1988, at fifty, from lung cancer, Carver's reputation has blossomed. He has gone from being an influential—and controversial—member of a briefly fashionable school of experimental fiction to being an...