Raymond Carver was born in unpromising circumstances in Clatskanie, Oregon on 25 May 1938. His father, Clevie Raymond Carver, worked in a sawmill while his mother, Ella Beatrice Casey, was a waitress and retail clerk. The family moved to Yakima, Washington when Carver was three years old, and by the time he was eighteen he had moved with his father to Chester, California to work in a sawmill himself. Poverty, domestic violence and his father's alcoholism dominated Carver's early life and this unhappy background, and the places where young Raymond grew up, would later dominate his own fiction. Father and son returned to Yakima in 1957, which proved a defining year in Carver's life. Still only nineteen, he married the sixteen-year-old Mary

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First published 07 July 2001

Citation: Varvogli, Aliki. "Raymond Carver". The Literary Encyclopedia. 7 July 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=770, accessed 20 November 2009.]