Carver began to object to Lish's editing, but he wasn't sure what to object to. He wrote a five-page letter in July 1980 telling Lish that he could not allow him to publish ''What We Talk About'' as Lish had edited it. He wrote, ''Maybe if I were alone, by myself, and no one had ever seen these stories, maybe then, knowing that your versions are better than some of the ones I sent, maybe I could get into this and go with it.'' But he feared being caught. ''Tess has seen all of these and gone over them closely. Donald Hall has seen many of the new ones. . .and Richard Ford, Toby Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff, too, some of them. . . . How can I explain to these fellows when I see them, as I will see them, what happened?'' He begged to be let out of his contract or at least to delay publication: ''Please, Gordon, for God's sake help me in this and try to understand. . . . I've got to pull out of this one. Please hear me. I've been up all night thinking on this. . . . I'll say it again, if I have any standing or reputation or cedibility [sic] in the world, I owe it to you. I owe you this more-or-less pretty interesting life I have [but] I can't take the risk as to what might happen to me.'' In the same letter, he wrote imploringly, ''[M]y very sanity is on the line here. . . . I feel it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story.''

Lish does not recall being moved. ''My sense of it was that there was a letter and that I just went ahead.'' He knew what was best for Carver -- even if Carver didn't see it that way. In the end, ''What We Talk About'' was published much as Lish wanted.

The book received front-page reviews. Critics praised its minimalist style and announced a new school of fiction. Even so, Carver continued to press for stylistic control over his work. He insisted that if Lish wanted to edit his next collection, he would have to keep his hands off. ''I can't undergo [that] kind of surgical amputation and transplantation,'' he wrote Lish in August 1982. ''Please help me with this book as a good editor, the best . . .not as my ghost,'' he pleaded two months later.

Lish reluctantly complied. ''So be it,'' he wrote in December 1982 after giving the manuscript to ''Cathedral'' only a light edit -- although he wrote some acerbic criticisms in the margins. Even then, Carver feared a sneak attack. ''I don't need to tell you that it's critical for me that there not be any messing around with titles or text,'' he warned Lish. Publicly, Carver also began to make a break. He made a point of telling interviewers that he controlled every aspect of his stories, invoking the adage that he knew a story was finished when he went through it once and put the commas in, then went through again and took the commas out.

Lish was angered by Carver's rebellion. He began asking his friends whether he should make his ''surrogate work'' public. They advised him to keep quiet. Don DeLillo, for example, warned him against taking Carver on. ''I appreciate, and am in sympathy with, everything you say in your letter,'' he wrote to Lish. ''But the fact is: there is no exposing Carver. . . . Even if people knew, from Carver himself, that you are largely responsible for his best work, they would immediately forget it. It is too much to absorb. Too complicated. Makes reading the guy's work an ambiguous thing at best. People wouldn't think less of Carver for having had to lean so heavily on an editor; they'd resent Lish for complicating the reading of the stories.

''In the meantime,'' he ended, ''take good care of your archives.''

Once Carver ended his professional relationship with Lish, he never looked back. He didn't need to. ''Cathedral'' was his most celebrated work yet. Famous writers wanted to meet him; Saul Bellow wrote him an appreciative note. The collection was nominated for both a Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Proudly, Carver wrote a letter to Lish in which he noted that the title story ''went straight from the typewriter into the mail.''

Indeed, many writers and critics see Carver's later work -- stories like ''Blackbird Pie'' and ''Errand'' -- as his best efforts, his final brilliant flowering. Seen in this light, the Lish period, though responsible for bringing him to national attention, was an apprenticeship to be transcended. Some of Carver's friends certainly saw it that way. The poet Donald Hall read a manuscript copy of ''The Bath'' before Lish cut it. He asked Carver's permission to publish the original version under its original title, ''A Small, Good Thing,'' in Ploughshares magazine. In this more expansive, uplifting form, the story won a 1983 O. Henry Award. ''I was hearthurt at what had happened to that story,'' Hall remembers. ''I've wondered in my head why Lish did what he did. Was it unconscious jealousy?''