Carol Sklenicka Popular Books

Carol Sklenicka Biography & Facts

Carol Sklenicka (December 11, 1948) is an American biographer and literary scholar known for her authoritative, full-scale biographies of two important figures in late twentieth-century American literature: acclaimed short story masters Raymond Carver and Alice Adams. Sklenicka's Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009) and her Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer (2019) were published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Both Carver and Adams were known for intimate, strikingly lean narrative styles based closely on life experiences, and both are credited with modeling a new commitment to realism in American fiction. Both biographies, extensively researched, run to nearly 600 pages and both have been characterized as definitive. Sklenicka's biographies are the first and (as of 2023) the only biographies of Carver and Adams. Sklenicka's biography of Carver was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times Book Review and a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the Seattle Times. Her biography of Adams was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named a Christian Science Monitor Book of the Month. Early years, education, and teaching Sklenicka grew up in Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County on the central coast of California. Her father, Robert James Sklenicka, was born in 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents were both born in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Czechoslovakia, and now the Czech Republic. Her mother, Dorothy Arthur Johnston Sklenicka, was born in 1906 in Oklahoma Territory. Sklenicka's maternal grandmother was born in Wales; her grandfather was born in the United States of Scots-Irish extraction. Graduating in 1971 from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Sklenicka taught briefly at the secondary school level then entered graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. Studying with critic and translator Naomi Lebowitz, novelist Stanley Elkin, and poet Howard Nemerov, she received a Ph.D. in English and American literature there in 1986. She taught literature and creative writing at Marquette University and at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. She is married to poet and novelist R.M. Ryan and lives near the Russian River in Sonoma County in northern California. Author and biographer Over the years as an academic, author, and researcher Sklenicka has contributed short fiction and essays in criticism to multiple academic and literary journals, including Confrontation, South Atlantic Quarterly, Iowa Woman, and Sou'wester. In 1991 her book-length critical study D.H. Lawrence and the Child was published by the University of Missouri Press. The Lawrence book included a substantial amount of biographical material and beginning in 1994 Sklenicka began focusing her time on researching and writing the first of two successive full-length literary biographies. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life Raymond Carver, in a relatively short writing career marked significantly by alcoholism (he died in 1988 at age 50), published 72 short stories in dozens of publications, from little magazines to The New Yorker. He assembled his stories into four highly praised collections. The first, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, was nominated for a National Book Award, and the fourth, Cathedral, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. (Carver also published six books of poetry.) “Carver's stories became a staple in Esquire during the 1970s and The New Yorker in the '80s,” Paul Gray observed in a 2001 piece in Time magazine. “Carver had, during the 12 years preceding his death, virtually reinvented the American short story.” According to Encyclopædia Britannica’s assessment, “Carver's stripped-down, minimalist prose style is remarkable for its honesty and power. He is credited with helping revitalize the genre of the English-language short story in the late 20th century.” Sklenicka's biography of Raymond Carver has been highly praised. “As a chronicle of Carver's growth as a writer,” novelist Stephen King observed, “Sklenicka's book is invaluable.”The San Francisco Chronicle found Sklenicka's book, ten years in the writing, an "exhaustively researched and definitive biography.” Sklenicka began by interviewing friends and relatives who had known Carver during his hardscrabble growing up in rural, economically depressed areas of the Pacific northwest. Ultimately she conducted interviews with more than three hundred sources for the book. Carver's widow and literary executor Tess Gallagher declined to participate, but Sklenicka interviewed Carver's first wife, his adult children, and many of his closest friends and literary and academic colleagues. Reviewers cite three different areas as strengths of the Carver biography: its revelation and detailing of the dysfunctional effects of Carver's years of alcoholism and the corrosive consequences for his family, his health, and his career; its detailed and systematic documentation and analysis of Carver's relationship with his first editor Gordon Lish, including Lish's heavy-handed and uncredited rewrites of many of Carver's early stories; and Sklenicka's effectiveness in literary analysis, judiciously tying events and perspectives from Carver's turbulent personal life to specific content in his fictional narratives and poems. “Sklenicka's biography,” Jacob Appel notes in Ploughshares, “genuinely augments the meaning of Carver's stories, providing a necessary companion to his work.” Sklenicka’s effort in locating and interviewing more than 300 sources for the Carver biography is complemented by her work in finding and assembling the 16-page gallery of dozens of photographs that occupy the very center of the book. The author, her editor, and the Simon & Schuster book-design team staged and sequenced the images to provide a separate biographical narrative, this one visual, that echoes and deepens the book’s written narrative. Carver’s rough-and-tumble childhood and family life in lumber mill company houses in eastern Washington state, his early and soon-troubled marriage, his struggles to write while shouldering aside economic privation, his alcoholism and marital affairs, his emerging status as a literary figure, and his early death are all represented. With this photographic gallery as source material, the book-design team settled on a brooding close-up portrait of Carver for the book’s front cover. Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer Alice Adams, according to Professor Bryant Mangum in a 2019 book-length study, created powerful short fiction narratives that place her “in the company of such great American writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.” More than 25 of her stories appeared in the New Yorker between 1969 and 1995. Her stories appear in no fewer than 22 of the respected O. Henry Awards anthologies, and in several volumes of Best American Short Stories, including .... Discover the Carol Sklenicka popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Carol Sklenicka books.