In August 1978, Raymond Carver drove his rattletrap Ford station wagon from Plainfield, Vermont, to the University of Texas at El Paso, where the twice-bankrupt writer had been offered a badly needed job. He arrived by Greyhound bus, the car having broken down 120 miles from campus.
Not long after he had settled in, the phone rang. “Is Raymond Carver there?” asked the voice on the other end. “No,” Carver said. Only once he had been assured that the caller was an editor with Random House’s Vintage Books division named Gary Fisketjon, and not a debt collector, did Carver respond in the affirmative.