User:JayDivine/sandbox/Additional Subsections for Carol Sklenicka

Carol Sklenicka (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’s. Both Carver and Adams were known for intimate, strikingly lean narrative styles based closely on life experiences, and both are credited with modeling a new commitment to realism in American fiction. Both biographies, extensively researched, 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 literary journals, including Confrontation, South Atlantic Quarterly, Iowa Woman, and Sou'wester. 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 and beginning in 1994 Sklenicka began focusing her time on researching and writing the first of two successive full-length literary biographies.

Selected works

 * D. H. Lawrence and the Child. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.
 * Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. New York: Scribner, 2009.
 * Alice Adams: A Writer's Life. New York: Scribner, 2019.