Carol Sklenicka (born 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,1. ^On Carver see Jason M. Appel in Ploughshares, http://www.pshares.org/read/author-detail.cfm?intAuthorID=7472 2009. On Adams see Elaine Woo, “Alice Adams: Novelist, Short Story Writer,” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-may-29-me-42195-story.html. and both are credited with modeling a new commitment to realism in American fiction.2.^See the subsection below “In Support of Realism." Both biographies, extensively researched,3.^ On Carver see David Wiegand (December 19, 2009). "Serendipitous stay led writer to Raymond Carver". San Francisco Chronicle. https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Serendipitous-stay-led-writer-to-Raymond-Carver-3278150.php. Retrieved 27 September 2010. On Adams see Rumaan Alam (9 January 2020). "Alice Adams's Afterlife". The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/156132/alice-adamss-afterlife. Retrieved 28 August 2021. 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.Sklenicka’s critical essays and stories have appeared in numerous publications, including the following: “Room Changes.” Sou’wester 7, No. 1 (1979): 19-41; “Credit Expired.” Sou’wester 13, No. 3 (1986): 59-79; “Samuel Johnson and the Fiction of Activity.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 78 (1979): 214-23; “Lawrence's Vision of the Child: Reimagining Character and Consciousness.” The D. H. Lawrence Review 18 (Centennial Issue 1985-86): 151-68: “Henry James’s Evasion of Ending in The Golden Bowl.” Henry James Review 4:1(1982): 50-60; “Food for Memory: My Mother’s Life.” Iowa Woman 16 (1996-97): 44-49; “Putting Up Storms.” Transactions 85 (1997): 57-66; and “Clearance.” Confrontation 29 (Winter 1985): 130-34. 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^Sklenicka, Carol. D. H. Lawrence and the Child. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991). 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. ^Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (New York: Scribner, 2009) p. 495; pp. 496-500 provides a table with the publishing history of every Carver short story. He assembled his stories into four highly praised collections. The first, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, was nominated for a National Book Award,^Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (New York: Scribner, 2009), Introduction, p. xi. and the fourth, Cathedral, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.^Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (New York: Scribner, 2009) p. 418. (Carver also published six books of poetry.)^Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (New York: Scribner, 2009) p. 495. "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."^Gray, Paul. “Calls From Heaven: Five previously unpublished Raymond Carver short stories show his lasting genius” Time (April 2, 2001). https://content.time.com/time/world/article/ 0,8599,2047569,00.html 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."^King, Stephen. "Raymond Carver's Life and Stories". (November 20, 2009). The New York Times. Retrieved 27 August 2021. The San Francisco Chronicle found Sklenicka's book, ten years in the writing, an "exhaustively researched and definitive biography."^Wiegand, David. "Serendipitous stay led writer to Raymond Carver". San Francisco Chronicle (December 19, 2009). Retrieved 27 September 2010. 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.^Wiegand, David. "Serendipitous stay led writer to Raymond Carver". San Francisco Chronicle (December 19, 2009). Retrieved 27 September 2010. 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.Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. New York: Scribner, 2009. The biography lists hundreds of sources and interviewees by individual name in the “Acknowledgments and Sources” section, pages 491-494. See also the book’s “Notes on Sources” section, pages 501-502. Finally see numerous individual citations in various chapters to information obtained in Sklenicka’s discussions with Maryann Burk Carver (MBC), Christine LaRae Carver (CLC), and Vance Lindsay Carver (VLC).
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;^Lacayo, Richard. "Man of Constant Sorrow". Time. Archived from the original on 17 November 2009. Retrieved 27 August 2021. The family suffered “just about every indignity that drunkenness confers,” Lacayo comments, and describes Sklenicka's account of those years as “harrowing”; 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;^King, Stephen. "Raymond Carver's Life and Stories". The New York Times. (November 20, 2009). Retrieved 27 August 2021. King describes Sklenicka's account of the Carver-Lish relationship as “eye-opening.” 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.
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."^Mangum, Bryant. Understanding Alice Adams. (University of South Carolina Press: 2019) p. 8. More than 25 of her stories appeared in the New Yorker between 1969 and 1995.^Applebome, Peter. “Alice Adams, 72, Writer of Deft Novels.” New York Times: May 28, 1999. Her stories appear in no fewer than 22 of the respected O. Henry Awards anthologies, ^Applebome, Peter. “Alice Adams, 72, Writer of Deft Novels.” New York Times: May 28, 1999. and in several volumes of Best American Short Stories, including John Updike's The Best American Short Stories of the Century.^Updike, John and Kenison, Katrina, editors. The Best American Short Stories of the Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Introduction, p. xxi. She is one of only four authors to win the prestigious O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement for her short stories.^Sklenicka, Carol. Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer (New York: Scribner, 2009) p. 362. (She also published 11 novels, including the national best seller Superior Women.) ^Sklenicka, Carol. Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer (New York: Scribner, 2009) p. 513.