Raymond Carver

Carver married at nineteen and had two children by twenty-one, supporting the family through years of sawmill work, deliveries, and janitorial jobs while studying under John Gardner at what is now Chico State, writing stories in whatever scraps of time the work left him. Alcoholism nearly destroyed him through his thirties (multiple hospitalizations, bankruptcy, a marriage in ruins) before he got sober for good in 1977, a turning point he called his second life.

His editor Gordon Lish cut his stories drastically for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, trimming some by half and reshaping their famously bare style; Carver later resented the extent of the cuts, and Cathedral, written after his sobriety, restored a warmer, fuller voice of his own choosing.

He left his first wife for the poet Tess Gallagher, married her only months before dying of lung cancer in 1988 at fifty.