It does my heart good when I ask young writers around CityBeat if they've ever heard of Raymond Carver and they look at me like I'm nuts.

¨Of course!"

¨He was one of the best short story writers around."

¨His poems are wonderful," are the usual responses.

But writer Stephanie Dunlap offers more: ¨He distills the smallest, most specific human encounters and the base human emotions and motivations into something both universally damning and forgiving. We are all stupid and shortsighted and none of us can really help it."

Aug. 2 marked the 17th anniversary of Carver's death. He died at his home in Port Angeles, Wash., at 6:20 in the morning. He died of lung cancer at the age of 50.

¨Even though his life was shortened by way too much, I think he thought it was a fair bargain in some ways," says close friend and novelist Richard Ford (Sportswriter, Independence Day) from his East Boothbay Harbor home in Maine. ¨What had happened to him in his second life (his first life was driven by alcoholism) was so wonderful and made him so happy. The last thing he wrote, "Gravy,' says that ("Don't weep for me,' he wrote to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.'). I think he thought, "Well, OK, I don't want to die but if I gotta die, I really had a good run at it.' "

¨He once called me up and said, "Richard, by god, The Wheel of Fortune's struck on my number,' " Ford says. ¨There was sort of a strange irony to that. He wasn't long for this world when he said it, but that was typical of him. He saw the world as a big crap game. He just believed once it started going his way that was the way it was going to go. And in terms of his writing life, he was right."

Raymond Carver was born on May 25, 1938, in Clatskanie, Ore. He married at 19 and fathered two children by the time he was 20. While juggling a variety of blue-collar jobs and fatherhood, he always found time to write. In 1958, he moved his family to Paradise, Calif. and enrolled at Chico State College where he began an apprenticeship under writer and teacher John Gardner.

His first published story, ¨The Furious Seasons," appeared in Selection in 1960, which lead to a number of his stories and poems being published in a variety of small literary magazines that paid in copies rather than cash. That changed in 1971 when ¨Neighbors" was published in Esquire under the watchful eye of fiction editor Gordon Lish.

In his association with Lish, Carver became known as a ¨minimalist" writer with a conviction that less is more. His fiction grew leaner and more laconic. With Lish as his editor, Carver published Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in 1976 with McGraw-Hill.

While his professional life was now totally in focus, his personal life was coming to a standstill. A heavy drinker since the birth of his children, he was seldom sober and often experienced alcoholic blackouts. He became estranged from his wife and children and was hospitalized four times during 1976 and 1977 for alcoholism. He would later call this his ¨bad Raymond days." During his ¨first life," he also filed for two bankruptcies.

On June 2, 1977, he stopped drinking. With the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, Carver's second life began. At a writer's conference during that year at Southern Methodist University, Carver met Richard Ford.

¨I had published at that time one book and I was just sort of a lucky-to-be-there guy," Ford remembers. ¨Ray was invited the way I was, sort of a one-book guy, but when we met each other, I don't know, he was such a touching man, such a funny and affecting man, you just liked him the minute you laid eyes on him. We all knew he had been down on his luck and had drunk a lot, and that made him in a way all the more touching, because you could see -- he was by that time sober -- how hard it was for him to go out into the public. He desperately wanted to, he desperately loved it -- he liked his work. He was lovable, sweet and funny."

The following year, Carver would come to know Gary Fisketjon, who is currently editor-at-large for Alfred A. Knopf.

¨I reviewed Furious Seasons for the Village Voice, I want to guess 1978," says Fisketjon from his New York office. ¨Of course, that was after his first book, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and I was already sort of a kid editor at Random House and the guy who was running it at the time read my review and said, "You think this guy's good don't you?' I told him I thought he (Carver) was the best story writer in the country and he said, "Well, we should go after him.' I essentially just called Ray up out of the blue. He was living in El Paso at the time and was already involved with Gordon Lish, who had published his first book. We kind of hit it off; we were both from Oregon and we became very good friends.

¨There was this tension that developed between Ray and Gordon," Fisketjon says. ¨So even before they could kind of call it quits, I had already published Ray's first two books of poems and it just sort of proceeded from there. I think we were in a like mine as to what editing was and what it wasn't."

Under Fisketjon's editing style, Carver's short stories became longer and more life affirming.

¨So much of his early work was written in the most grinding poverty and alcoholism and difficulties of one sort or the other, and maybe because of that, it gave such humor to those early stories," he says. ¨His writing was never depressing, because there was so much so hugely funny about it all -- black humor would be one way of putting it -- but funny nonetheless."

Fisketjon would be Carver's last editor and the masterful stories and poems written during that time reflected just how much Carver loved his second life.

Cathedral was released in 1981 and would become Carver's most popular collection of short stories. That didn't surprise Fisketjon.

¨Cathedral is hard to beat," he says. ¨It's just wonderful."

Carver found true love during his second life. A few months before be died, he married his companion and collaborator of the previous 10 years, Tess Gallagher. He loved traveling with her all over the world and being a famous writer and being read, but sometimes his first life haunted him.

¨He showed me manuscripts up until the time he published What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Ford says. ¨He would send me several stories at once and there were several I liked a lot and there were a couple I didn't like, and I told him about the one or two I thought he either needed to work on or throw out of the book. He didn't agree with me and didn't like me disliking them very much, so he never sent me anything again.

¨I don't think it made him mad at me," Ford continues. ¨He just didn't like it. Ray didn't like things that made him feel bad. I think that's because when he was drunk and everything was going crazy in his home life, he felt bad a lot. The older you get, the things that really wounded you in your life, you like to stay away from. The things that had burned him in his life, the things that made him heartsick, he didn't want to visit those things again."

But towards the end, Carver didn't mind revisiting some of his early work.

¨When we did the new and selected stories, Where I'm Calling From, that was great," Fisketjon says. ¨Ray got to chose what he liked best from his early works and I think there were seven new stories included there, and the point was to show -- like any really, really good writer -- (that) he was always adjusting his ambitions and changing. That was certainly the hope that he had and I had in doing this book, which was kind of a retrospective of a career that would continue long into the future as it reached into the past. But, alas, that didn't prove to be the case."

During the last few months of his life, Carver never revealed the urgency of his condition. But he did tell interviewers what he hoped might be his epitaph.

¨I can't think of anything else I'd rather be called than a writer," he said.

¨Ray had the world's esteem when he was alive," Ford says. ¨And I think he would just be quite happy if nothing ever changed after that. He was a great writer and he was a great guy. I don't think my life has ever been the same since he left it. I don't think I've ever felt the same about anything again.