Joyce Carol Oates has often expressed an intense
nostalgia for the time and place of her childhood, and her working-class
upbringing is lovingly recalled in much of her fiction. Yet she has also
admitted that the rural, rough-and-tumble surroundings of her early years
involved "a daily scramble for existence." Growing up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York,
she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the elementary grades. As a small child,
she told stories instinctively by way of drawing and painting before learning
how to write. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age fourteen, she
began consciously training herself, "writing novel after novel" throughout
high school and college.
Success came early: while attending Syracuse University
on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After
graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married
Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship; in 1962, the couple settled in Detroit,
a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the
violent American reality. Her finest early novel, them, along
with a steady stream of other novels and short stories, grew out of her Detroit
experience. "Detroit, my 'great'
subject," she has written, "made me the person I am, consequently the
writer I am—for
better of worse."
Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, just across the Detroit
river. During this immensely productive decade, she published new books at the
rate of two or three per year, all the while maintaining a full-time academic
career. Though still in her thirties, Oates had become one of the most
respected and honored writers in the United States.
Asked repeatedly how she managed to produce so much excellent work in a wide
variety of genres, she gave variations of the same basic answer, telling the New
York Times in 1975 that "I have always lived a very conventional life
of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic, no need, even, to
organize my time." When a reporter labeled her a "workaholic,"
she replied, "I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of
'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly
rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the
word."
In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton,
New Jersey,
where she continues to teach in Princeton University's
creative writing program; she and her husband also operate a small press and
publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
Shortly after arriving in Princeton,
Oates began writing Bellefleur,
the first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked
established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American history.
Published in the early 1980s, these novels marked a departure from the
psychological realism of her earlier work. But Oates returned powerfully to the
realistic mode with ambitious family chronicles (You Must Remember This,
Because It Is Bitter, and
Because It Is My Heart), novels of female experience (Solstice, Marya : A Life),
and even a series of pseudonymous suspense novels (published under the name
"Rosamond Smith")
that again represented a playful experiment with literary genre. As novelist
John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the
aesthetical map."
The dramatic trajectory of Oates's career, especially her amazing rise from an
economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the world's
most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the mythic
pursuit and achievement of the American dream. Yet for all her success and
fame, Oates's daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little,
and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains
steadfast. Not surprisingly, a quotation from that other prolific American
writer, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board over her desk, and
perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of her life and writing: "We
work in the dark—we
do what we can—we give what we have.
Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness
of art."
From Greg Johnson's
A Reader's Guide to the Recent Novels of Joyce Carol Oates
Copyright © 1996 by Greg Johnson
(printed by permission)
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