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." Edited by James Plath, professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, this volume in the Critical Insights series presents a variety of new essays on the significant and controversial writer. For readers who are studying Carver for the first time, a biographical sketch relates the details of his life and four essays survey the critical reception of his work, explore its cultural and historical contexts, situate Carver among his contemporaries, and review key themes in his work. Readers seeking a deeper understanding of the writer can then move on to other original essays that explore a bevy of topics, such as the author’s association with the literary movement dubbed "minimalism," the influence of the American West on Carver’s body of work, Carver’s approximation of the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the author’s documented struggles with alcoholism. Among the contributors are Chad Wriglesworth, Kirk Nesset, Claire Fabre, and Peter J. Bailey.