Raymond Carver's widow Tess Gallagher is apparently trying to get the original versions of his first stories published. These famous stories are well known to have been heavily edited by Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, but there's never been much information about exactly how extensive the changes were. The Times article has a PDF that lets you see a couple sections from both the published versions and the versions Gallagher is trying to get published.
I guess this is controversial, but apart from the understandable concerns of those closest to Carver, I don't really get why. To me it seems like more information is better, and the exercize of comparing different versions might be productive and instructive, whichever versions we prefer and for whichever reasons. A lot of the information is available in Lish's papers anyway; it's just not currently accessible to the public. Why shouldn't it be?
By the way, the article notes that Lish's papers are held at IU's Lilly Library, and I was just there last week visiting with the director, who was one of my professors when I was in college there. The library has become a real destination because their collection includes (among other things) these kinds of papers.
I guess I wasn't aware that Carver went on to distance himself from Lish later, I was under the impression that he continued to follow Lish's edits later, but after reading a bit of the PDF, it seems it wasn't that way. I think this would be great to see--these first stories published. I remember reading two different versions of the story "A Small Good Thing" in college, and now I guess that must've been the difference between the Lish-edited version and the original.
Actually, I'd been under the same impression (maybe we've discussed this before?). But you know, once the first stories were out and so successful, I wonder whether he felt the need to write more in the style of the Lish edits in his later work.
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