His interest in writing came relatively late in life and such interest also added to the families, woes as his desire to find a place where he could write and his children and wife could be happy eluded him, and his youthful marriage ended in divorce. Carver married young (19) and seemed to be traveling down the same road, with alcoholism and low wage work plaguing his young family. His early life, as the son of two working class people was a constant hardship as his father's alcoholism took its toll on the family and gave Carver great insight into living in an insular fashion, day by day, subsistence life. Carver's early critics, notably James Atlas in 1981 and Madison Bell in 1986, accused him of what amounts to a flatness, not only in language, but in artistic vision in this view, Carver leaves his characters in lives of quiet desperation (see Saltzman 1988, 178-82). Implicit in this labeling is the notion that his stories lack any transformative vision, that they present to us tales of alcoholics and losers as though blind, serf-destructive behaviors were matters of naturalistic fact and not subject to change through the insight stories can provide to their characters and their readers. Raymond Carver has often been described as a 'minimalist' writer, one who renders moments of contemporary American life in a language that is spare in expression and bleak in outlook.

His work is reflective of the lives of everyday people, including communication, miscommunication and connectivity. Raymond Carver was a working class author made famous mostly for his short fiction, which was given the genre title of minimalist.

Cathedral novel raymond carver