Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport,
New York.
She grew up on her parents' farm, outside the town, and went to the same
one-room schoolhouse her mother had attended. This rural area of upstate New York, straddling
Niagara and Erie
Counties,
had been hit hard by the Great Depression. The few industries the area enjoyed
suffered frequent closures and layoffs. Farm families worked desperately hard
to sustain meager subsistence. But young Joyce
enjoyed the natural environment of farm country, and displayed a precocious
interest in books and writing. Although her parents had little education, they
encouraged her ambitions. When, at age 14, her grandmother gave her first
typewriter, she began consciously preparing herself, "writing novel after
novel" throughout high school and college.
When she transferred to the high school in Lockport,
she quickly distinguished herself. An excellent student, she contributed to her
high school newspaper and won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University,
where she majored in English. When she was only 19, she won the "college
short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine.
Joyce Carol Oates was valedictorian of her graduating class. After
receiving her BA degree. she earned her
Master's in a single year at the University
of Wisconsin.
While studying in Wisconsin she met
Raymond
In 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, Michigan. Joyce
taught at the University
of Detroit
and had a front-row seat for the social turmoil engulfing America's
cities in the 1960s. These violent realities informed much of her early
fiction. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall was published when she
was 28. Her novel them received the National Book Award.
In 1968,
Joyce took a job at he University
of Windsor,
and the couple moved across the Detroit
River
to Windsor, in
the Canadian province
of Ontario.
In the ten years that followed, Joyce Carol Oates published new books at the
extraordinary rate of two or three per year, while teaching full-time. Many of
her novels sold well; her short stories and critical essays solidified her
reputation. Despite some critical grumbling about her phenomenal productivity,
Oates had become one of the most respected and honored
writers in the United
States
though only in her thirties.
While still in Canada, Oates and her
husband started a small press and began to publish a literary magazine, The Ontario
Review. They continued these activities after 1978, when they moved to Princeton, New Jersey. Since
1978, Joyce Carol Oates has taught in the creative writing program at Princeton University.
Her literary work continued unabated. In the early 1980s, Oates surprised
critics and reader with a series of novels, beginning with Bellefluer,
in which she reinvented the conventions of Gothic fiction, using them to reimagine whole stretches of American history. Just as
suddenly, she returned, at the end of the decade, to her familiar realistic
ground with a series of ambitious family chronicles, including You Must
Remember This, and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. The
novels Solstice and Marya: A Life, also date from this period, and use the
materials of her family and childhood to create moving studies of the female
experience.
To date, she has published 37 novels and
novellas, including a series of experimental suspense novels under the
pseudonym Rosamond Smith. She has also published 23 volumes of short stories,
seven volumes of poetry, four volumes of plays and many volumes of short
stories, as well nonfiction works on literary subjects ranging from the poetry
of Emily Dickinson, the fiction of Dostoyevsky and James Joyce, to studies of
the gothic and horror genres, and on such non-literary subjects as the painter
George Bellows and the boxer Mike Tyson.
She is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University,
and continues to live in Princeton, with her
husband of over 35 years. In 1996, Joyce Carol Oates received the PEN/Malamud
Award for "a lifetime of literary achievement."
In http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/oat0bio-1
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