Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was published by McGraw-Hill, New York, in 1976, in a first printing of approximately 5,000 copies priced at $8.95. The collection was nominated for the National Book Award and established Carver as the most influential American short-story writer since Hemingway. The title story had appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1967; others had been published in Esquire, December, and various literary quarterlies. The collection’s impact on the American short story was immediate and lasting.
The Stories
The twenty-two stories take place in the working-class and lower-middle-class America that Carver knew from personal experience: small towns in the Pacific Northwest, service-industry jobs, apartments too small for the lives lived in them. The characters are waitresses, mechanics, salesmen, mill workers, and their wives. They drink too much. Their marriages are failing. They are not articulate about their suffering — and this inarticulation is the stories’ subject.
“Fat” is narrated by a waitress fascinated by an enormously overweight customer. “Neighbors” follows a couple who obsessively explore the apartment of their absent neighbours. “Put Yourself in My Shoes” traces an uncomfortable social evening between a writer and a man with stories to tell. The title story, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”, follows a community-college teacher who discovers that his wife had a one-night stand years earlier and walks through the night streets processing the revelation.
Carver’s method is radical subtraction. He removes everything that conventional fiction considers necessary: interior monologue, backstory, explanation, resolution. What remains is surface — dialogue, gesture, the objects in a room — and the reader must supply the emotion. The effect is not coldness but a peculiar intensity: the reader feels the characters’ pain precisely because it is not named.
The Minimalism Debate
Carver was labelled a “minimalist” — a term he disliked — and the label stuck. His style influenced a generation of writers (Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme) and provoked fierce critical debate. Supporters argued that Carver had stripped fiction to its essentials; detractors (including John Barth, who published a famous essay called “A Few Words About Minimalism”) argued that the method was a dead end, an abdication of the novel’s traditional ambitions.
The debate was complicated by the revelation, after Carver’s death, that his editor Gordon Lish had extensively cut and revised many of the stories in this collection and in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Carver’s original versions — longer, more discursive, more conventionally emotional — were published posthumously as Beginners (2009). The relationship between Carver and Lish remains one of the most contentious editorial questions in American literary history.
Collecting Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
First edition (1976, McGraw-Hill): Approximately 5,000 copies, $8.95.
Identification points:
- McGraw-Hill imprint
- First printing stated
- Dust jacket
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $3,000–$10,000
- Signed first edition: $5,000–$15,000+
- Without jacket: $200–$500
Value trajectory: Strong appreciation since Carver’s death in 1988 at age fifty. The short-story form has a dedicated collector base, and Carver is its dominant figure. Signed copies are valuable — Carver was a generous signer during his lifetime, but the early death and the small first printing limit supply. The collection’s status as the inaugural text of American literary minimalism gives it historical significance beyond its literary merit.