Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I'm Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Also in 1977 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and met poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher, who later became his second wife. He died from lung cancer in 1988 at the age of fifty. His last book was a poetry collection called A New Path to the Waterfall.