Part 1 of Essay
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, on May 25, 1938, and lived in Port Angeles, Washington during his last ten, sober years until his death from cancer on August 2, 1988. He was twice awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1983 Carver received the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Livin ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... everything. "We thought we could do it all," he said in one interview, "We were poor but we thought that if we kept working, if we did the right things, the right things would happen" (Gentry 123). Somewhere in the middle of this life he realized, very much like one of his characters, that things would not change. What Carver deals with in almost all of his stories is the daily responsibilities of life weighing down on one's shoulders. "Almost all the characters in my stories come to the point where they re ....