Chuck Kinder, "who turned his friendship with Raymond Carver into a roman à clef, and whose long struggle to birth that book inspired a novel by one of his former students, Michael Chabon," died May 3, the New York Times reported. He was 76. Kinder taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh for many years and "was known for lively classes, livelier parties, a few memorable if underappreciated books and a certain literary-bad-boy posture."
Chabon, who studied under him in the 1980s at Pitt and published Wonder Boys in 1995, spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001 about Kinder's role in inspiring the character played by Michael Douglas in Curtis Hanson's 2000 film adaptation: "I remember peering into his office and seeing this monolithic pile of white paper--the inverse of the monolith from 2001--under his desk lamp. In my memory, it was 4,000 pages long. He was proud of how big a bastard it was."
Kinder "finally wrestled his long-gestating manuscript into a book of reasonable length: Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale," the Times wrote. His other books include The Silver Ghost (1979) and two 2014 poetry collections, All That Yellow and Imagination Motel.
Diane Cecily, his wife, recalled that Kinder's first novel, Snakehunter (1973), earned him a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, "where he met this incredible collection of writers," including Carver. "It was just that time." She added that Kinder "sought to recreate that environment when he joined the Pitt faculty in 1980. They had married in 1975, and their house in Pittsburgh became a center of gravity for students, faculty members and visiting writers," the Times noted.
"He included hundreds of writers in his embrace, and he'd root for you and read your stuff many years after you had the pleasure to sit in his classroom, which was often his living room," said novelist and former student Jane McCafferty.
"His teaching didn't stop at the classroom," Chabon told the Washington Post. "He was open with his struggles as a writer. I remember him saying to me, 'The book defeats me daily.' But the thing that made him so remarkable and so inspiring as a teacher was that he just loved literature. What you felt after an hour in Chuck Kinder's classroom was that passion for literature and writing."