Carol Sklenicka Views
Raymond Carver's life, as related in the exhaustive and definitive new biography by Carol Sklenicka, reads like a Raymond Carver story. That isn't merely a facile observation about a writer who mined his own life for his work: His impact on American fiction of the late-20th century was such that in the '80s and beyond, you'd often hear folks proclaiming that a bit of real-life flotsam was like one of Carver's brittle, perfectly crafted short stories.
Carol Sklenicka grew up in central California during the 1960s. She attended college in San Luis Obispo and taught high school in Oxnard before going to graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied with Naomi Lebowitz, Stanley Elkin, and Howard Nemerov. Her stories, essays, and reviews have been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Confrontation, Sou'wester and other periodicals.To research the life of Raymond Carver, she studied archives and visited towns all over the United States and conducted hundreds of interviews with his relatives, friends, and colleagues. She lives with her husband, poet R. M. Ryan, near the Russian River in... Read full bio
Carol Sklenicka grew up in central California during the 1960s. She attended college in San Luis Obispo and taught high school in Oxnard before going to graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied with Naomi Lebowitz, Stanley Elkin, and Howard Nemerov. Her stories, essays, and reviews have been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Confrontation, Sou'wester and other periodicals.To research the life of Raymond Carver, she studied archives and visited towns all over the United States and conducted hundreds of interviews with his relatives, friends, and colleagues. She lives with her husband, poet R. M. Ryan, near the Russian River in... Read full bio
Carol Sklenicka draws on hundreds of interviews with people who knew Carver, prodigious research in libraries and private collections, and all of Carveri’s poems and stories for Raymond Carver. Her portrait is generous and wise without swerving from discordant issues in Carverl’s private affairs. Above all Sklenicka shows how Carvert’s quintessentially American life fostered the stories that knowing readers have cherished from their first publication until the present day.
Carol Sklenicka Images
