Critical Insights: Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver made the short story a viable literary form; since Carver, short-story collections became a marketable commodity in the book trade. Both as a model and as a teacher, he had such an influence on younger fiction writers that author Jay McInerney could truthfully say (alluding to a famous statement that Fyodor Dostoevski made about nikolai Gogol) that there is hardly a single American short-story writer younger than Carver who did not “come out of Carver’s overcoat.”