Raymond Carver is perhaps the most influential American fiction writer of the last forty years. Often labeled a minimalist (to his disgruntle-ment), his style came to dominate, and then inform through resistance, the next twenty years of literary fiction following his death. Charles McGrath, a longtime New Yorker editor and former editor of the New York Times Book Review, called Carver, ‘the most widely imitated writer I ever saw.’1 Carver’s influence has been perhaps most marked in the now-ubiquitous MFA programs throughout the U.S. In his book about the institutionalization of creative writing in America, The Program Era, Mark McGurl claims Carver’s, ‘short fiction has become required reading for students of creative writing, the very model (with Hemingway) of writing as painstaking understatement.’2 Most of the scholarship on Carver has focused on his early work, and in a range of ways on the complex matrix of three primary influences: his study and emulation of Ernest Hemingway; his complex and sometimes fraught relationship with his first editor, Gordon Lish; and the impact of his personal difficulties, especially his alcoholism, on his creative output.