In August 1999, a decade after Raymond Carver's death at the age of fifty from lung cancer, The New York Review of Books published an extended feature on Carver's place in American letters. The article’s author, the critic A. O. Scott, opened by arguing that while plenty of American writers are hyped, imitated, even admired, few have the privilege of claiming, as Carver did near the end of his life in his poem ‘Late Fragment’, that they are ‘beloved’. While at the height of his career in the 1980s, the article argues, Carver's minimalist publications were influential, since his death, he has become an ‘international icon of traditional American literary values’. Which is to say, ‘His genius – but more his honesty, his decency, his commitment to the exigencies of craft – is praised by an extraordinary diverse cross section of his peers.’

As Scott's generous retrospective suggests, for a writer who only published four major story collections during his lifetime, Carver’s cultural impact is remarkably exponential. While he was alive, Carver's influence on the American short story was widely noted, but not so generally known is that since his death Carver's work has continued to have an impact on a number of significant contemporary writers and artists. The list of those who attest to his influence is as diverse as those studied in the forthcoming expository chapters – Jay McInerney, Haruki Murakami, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Chuck Kinder and Willy Vlautin – as well as others like the filmmakers Robert Altman, Ray Lawrence, Dan Rush and Andrew Kotatko, the writers Salman Rushdie, Stuart Evers and Denis Johnson, the musician Paul Kelly and the photographer Bob Adelman. The admiration of such a multivalent list suggests that Carver's writing, despite its working-class subject matter and its particular Pacific Northwest setting, is not bound by its immediate geographic or cultural context. This book argues that the fundamental reason for Carver's extensive afterlife is that there is a tight and intricate relationship between his texts and his perceived lifestyle and writing practice; that underlying these ideas is the perception that Carver broadly represents a return to what might be best understood as a more ‘real’ form of literature – what Scott calls ‘traditional American literary values’ – one that is, Carver's advocates would argue, more authentic than other kinds of recent writing.