Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first book of poems, Near Klamath, under Schmitz's guidance. He audited classes at what was then Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. He did all of the janitorial work in the first hour and then wrote through the rest of his shift. In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family resided in Sacramento, California, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. 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. Maryann, who postponed completing her education to support her husband's educational and literary endeavors, eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.
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from Iowa in 1966 on later curricula vitae. According to biographer Carol Sklenicka, Carver falsely claimed to have received an M.F.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. Homesick for California and unable to fully acclimatize to the program's upper middle class milieu, he only completed 12 credits out of the 30 required for a M.A. With his B- 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. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the college's literary magazine, in which he published several of his own pieces under his own name as well as the pseudonym John Vale. He chose not to take the foreign language courses required by the English program and received a B.A. alumnus of the Iowa program) at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California. Ĭarver continued his studies under the short story writer Richard Cortez Day (like Gardner, a recent Ph.D.
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"Furious Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and is part of the collection, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. In 1961, Carver's first published story, "The Furious Seasons", appeared. 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. Writing career Ĭarver moved to Paradise, California with his family to be close to his mother-in-law. Carver worked as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer, while Maryann worked as an administrative assistant, high school English teacher, salesperson, and waitress. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born a year later. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957.
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In June 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. 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.Īfter graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. His brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943.Ĭarver was educated at local schools in Yakima. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His father, a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and a heavy drinker. Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Ella Beatrice (born Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver.