Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

Edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll / Capra Press, 1993, pp. 275, $14.95 (paper)

The release of "Short Cuts," Robert Altman's film based on the short stories of Raymond Carver, likely will attract new readers to the man once cited as "the most influential writer of his generation." Admired for his stories and poetry. Carver was 50 when he died of lung cancer in 1988. Remembering Ray is designed to take the measure of a brief, but enduring life.

Collections of recollections in lieu of a coherent biography are fashionable, but often facile and disjointed. In the case of Carver, a protean presence who touched many different people in different ways, the genre fits. A collective biography, Remembering Ray offers testimony from 43 people--friends, students, colleagues, and readers--who knew or read Carver at various stages of his lite. Carver himself identified June 2, 1977-the day he gave up the drinking that almost killed him--as marking the birth of a transformed self. The editors have gathered accounts of the brilliant, but self-destructive young hell-raiser as well as of the sober, focused man whose last 10 years were extraordinarily productive and rich in friendships and love.

The book publishes 14 poems about Carver by such authors as Marvin Bell, Hayden Carruth, Jane Kenyon, Joyce Carol Oates, and Charles Wright. At least as affecting is a memoir by Dorothy Catlett, whom Carver hired as a typist during his final years. Robert Coles recalls the radical effect of Carver's work on the students Coles taught at Harvard, and several...