Carver was already considered one of America's premier short story writers when "Where I'm Calling From" was first published, in the New Yorker in 1982. The story was chosen for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories, 1983 published by Houghton Mifflin. Carver's story "Cathedral" had been chosen for the preceding year's edition. Both of these stories were a part of Carver's 1983 collection entitled Cathedral, which was nominated for both a National Book Critics' Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

Carver's work, however, has not been without controversy. Many Critics believed that Carveralong with other minimalist writers-were outmoded in their realism and simplistic in their characterizations. James Atlas, for example, wrote in the Atlantic that he found Carver's prose "so aggressive in the suppression of detail that one is left with a hunger for richness, texture, excess." Minimalists' work in general has suffered under a long list of...