The writer Raymond Carver, whose short stories inspired the Robert Altman film Short Cuts, has been hailed a great stylist of American literature.

Now his widow wants to publish a posthumous edition of his most famous book that will show that his strikingly minimalist stories were stripped bare by his legendary editor, Gordon Lish.

Scholars agree that this could alter Carver’s literary standing radically – but are divided about whether it would be for the better or the worse.

William Stull, a University of Hartford professor who unearthed the original stories from the editor’s archives, insists that they will enhance his reputation.

“It will put to rest any notion of Carver as any type of minimalist. It will also highlight the effect of Gordon Lish on American literature in the last quarter century, which is enormous,” he said.

Brian Evenson, a professor at Brown University, calls the planned publication a big mistake that could “profoundly damage Carver’s reputation”. He said: “One can argue with the extent of Lish’s revisions but the majority of the unedited stories can only damage Carver’s reputation if published in their original form.

“Maybe they shouldn’t have been revised as extensively as they were but they did seriously need to be revised in any case.”

Carver, the son of an alcoholic lumber-mill worker in the Pacific Northwest, is sometimes called “the American Chekhov”. After struggling with alcoholism himself, he died of lung cancer at 50 in 1988.

His breakthrough work was his 1981 collection of 17 short stories titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, edited heavily by Mr Lish.

Carver first met Mr Lish when they were working across the street from each other at textbook publishers in northern California. When Mr Lish became literary editor of Esquire magazine, Carver wrote stories for him. Carver followed Mr Lish again when he moved to the Alfred A. Knopf, which put out the 1981 book.

When he received the manuscript, Mr Lish slashed about half of Carver’s words, rewrote ten of the endings and changed the title. The cuts provoked a strong protest from the writer.

Now his widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, plans to publish the original text under Carver’s original title, Beginners. “I just think it’s so important for Ray’s book, which has been a kind of secret, to appear,” she told The New York Times.

Gary Fisketjon, Carver’s last editor at Knopf, which holds the copyright, strongly opposes Ms Gallagher’s plan as an attempt to rewrite history.

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