Back to the beginning
Delivered in bow-tight, minimalist prose, he depicted in sharp, brutal detail the disenfranchised and the down-at-heel, lives that had been worn to the nub and relationships taken to the alcohol-sodden brink. These were stories of life, death and all the broken things in between.
A recovering alcoholic and on first-name terms with the gutter, Carver was writing about a world he knew intimately and every line hummed with the dispassionate precision and unfussy static of gospel truth. But all was not as it seemed. Another hand was at work in these stories and a pretty heavy-handed one at that. Gordon Lish, editor of Esquire Magazine, entered Carver’s writing life in the late ‘60s introducing the young author’s work into the lucrative glossy magazine market. Later, after Lish had moved to McGraw Hill, he published Carver’s first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? His editorial style was aggressive. Following the dictum of “use five words instead of 15”, he cut the stories for the breakthrough collection, shedding close to 50% of the text. Carver was devastated and pleaded with Lish not to proceed with the publication of the book, but to no avail. The resultant acclaim seemed to fully justify the editorial stance.
