In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family.

[7] He became interested in writing while attending Chico State College and enrolled in a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, then a recent doctoral graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career.

[9] Carver continued his studies under the short story writer Richard Cortez Day (alumnus of the Iowa program) beginning in autumn 1960 at Humboldt State College in Arcata.

[10] With his B-minus average, exacerbated by his penchant to forsake coursework for literary endeavors, ballasted by a sterling recommendation from Day, Carver was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop on a $1,000 fellowship for the 1963–1964 academic year.

Homesick for California and unable to fully adjust to the program's upper middle class milieu, he only completed 12 credits out of the 30 required for a M.A.

Although program director Paul Engle awarded him a fellowship for a second year of study after Maryann Carver personally interceded and compared her husband's plight to Tennessee Williams' deleterious experience in the program three decades earlier, Carver decided to leave the University of Iowa at the end of the semester.

After completing graduate work at Stanford, she briefly enrolled in the University of California, Santa Barbara's English doctoral program when Carver taught at the institution as a visiting lecturer in 1974.

[6] In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family resided in Sacramento, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital.

in Martha Foley's annual Best American Short Stories anthology and the impending publication of Near Klamath by the English Club of Sacramento State College.

He briefly enrolled in the library science graduate program at the University of Iowa that summer but returned to California following the death of his father.

[6] After the publication of "Neighbors" in the June 1971 issue of Esquire at the instigation of Lish (by now ensconced as the magazine's fiction editor), Carver began to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz at the behest of provost James B.

Hall, an Iowa alumnus and early mentor to Ken Kesey at the University of Oregon, commuting from his new home in Sunnyvale, California.

Having endured a succession of failed applications to the Stegner Fellowship, Carver was admitted to the prestigious non-degree Stanford University graduate creative writing program for the 1972–1973 term, where he cultivated friendships with Kesey-era luminaries Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman in addition to contemporaneous fellows Chuck Kinder, Max Crawford, and William Kittredge.

[6] During his years of working at miscellaneous jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started abusing alcohol.

With the assistance of Kinder and Kittredge, he attempted to simultaneously commute to Berkeley and maintain his lectureship at Santa Cruz; after missing all but a handful of classes due to the inherent logistical hurdles of this arrangement and various alcohol-related illnesses, Hall gently enjoined Carver to resign his position.

[13] The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll's review[14] of Maryann Burk Carver's 2006 memoir[15] describes the decline of her and Raymond's marriage.

The fall began with Ray's trip to Missoula, Mont., in '72 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge.

That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge's birthday party.

In the fall of '78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life.

[6] While he continued to regularly smoke cannabis and later experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City, Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 had he not overcome his drinking.

"[17] Beginning in January 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas, in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, Washington, and in Tucson, Arizona.

In ensuing years, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that read "Writers At Work" in order to be left alone.

For his part, Carver perceived Cathedral as a watershed in his career for its shift toward a more optimistic and confidently poetic style amid the diminution of Lish's literary influence.

[citation needed] In Carver's birth town of Clatskanie, Oregon, a memorial park and statue are at the corner of Lillich and Nehalem streets, across from the library.

[citation needed] In December 2006, Gallagher published an essay in The Sun magazine, titled "Instead of Dying", about alcoholism and Carver's having maintained his sobriety.

I would meet him five months after this choice, so I never knew the Ray who drank, except by report and through the characters and actions of his stories and poems.

In 2009, The New York Times Book Review and San Francisco Chronicle named Carol Sklenicka's unauthorized biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009), published by Scribner, one of the Best Ten Books of that year;[24][25] and the San Francisco Chronicle deemed it: "exhaustively researched and definitive biography".

[27][28] On October 1, 2009, the book, entitled Beginners,[29] was released in hardback in Great Britain,[30] followed by its publication in the Library of America edition which collected all of Carver's short fiction in a single volume.