Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16,
1938) is an American
author. Raised in rural, working-class New York,
Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty
novels, as well as numerous volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction,
resulting in a reputation for prolificacy. Her novel them
(1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For
(1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize. Oates is widely recognized as one of the leading American
novelists to have emerged since the 1960s.
As of 2008, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities
with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught
since 1978.
Oates has also written under the pseudonyms
"Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly."
Oates was born in Lockport, New York
to Carolina Oates, a homemaker, and Frederic Oates, a manufacturing worker. She
was raised Catholic
in the working-class farming community of Millersport,
At the beginning of her education, Oates attended the same one-room
school her mother attended as a child. She became interested in
reading at an early age, and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary
influence of my life. This was love at first sight!" In her early teens,
she devoured the writing of William
Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest
Hemingway, Charlotte Brontė, and Emily Brontė,
whose "influences remain very deep". Oates began writing
at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter. Oates later transferred
to several bigger, suburban schools, and graduated from Williamsville High School
in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper. She was the first in
her family to complete high school.
Oates won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined Phi Mu,
a financially draining experience she later regretted. Oates found
Oates published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she
was twenty-six years old. In 1966, she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You
Been?", a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan
and written after listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." The
story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles
Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson". The
story was frequently anthologized and was adapted into the 1985 film Smooth Talk,
starring Laura Dern.
In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted for
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?".
Oates's novel them (1969) received the National Book Award in 1970. Since then she has
published an average of two books a year, many of them novels. Frequent topics
in her work include rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for
power, female childhood and adolescence, and occasionally the supernatural.
Violence is a constant in her work, even leading Oates to have written an essay
in response to the question, "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?" She is
a fan of poet
and novelist Sylvia Plath, describing Plath's sole novel The Bell Jar
as a "near perfect work of art"; but though Oates has often been
compared to Plath, she disavows Plath's romanticism about suicide and among her
characters, she favors cunning, hardy survivors, both women and men. Oates'
concern with violence and other traditionally masculine topics has won her the
respect of such male authors as Norman Mailer.
In the early 1980s, Oates began writing stories in the gothic and horror
genres; in her foray into these genres, Oates said she was "deeply
influenced" by Kafka and felt "a writerly kinship" with James Joyce.
She gained much attention for her book-length essay On Boxing (1987).
In 1996, Oates published We Were the Mulvaneys, a novel
following the disintegration of an American family, which became a best-seller
after being selected by Oprah's Book Club in
For more than twenty-five years, Oates has been rumored to be a
"favorite" to win the Nobel Prize in Literature by oddsmakers
and critics. Her papers, held at
Oates taught in Beaumont, Texas for a year before
moving to
In 1995,
While studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oates met Raymond J.
Smith, a fellow graduate student, whom she married in 1961. Smith
became a professor of 18th-century literature, and later an editor and
publisher. Together the couple founded The Ontario Review, a
literary magazine, in 1974, on which Oates served as associate editor. In 1980,
Oates and Smith founded Ontario Review Books, an
independent publishing house. In 2004, Oates described the partnership as
"a marriage of like mindsboth my
husband and I are so interested in literature and we read the same books;
he'll be reading a book and then I'll read itwe trade and we talk about our reading at meal
times[...]it's a very collaborative and imaginative marriage". Smith died
of complications from pneumonia on February 18, 2008. In April 2008, Oates
wrote to an interviewer, "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really
have very little energy[...]My marriagemy
love for my husbandseems
to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his
death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment."
Oates is devoted to running, and has written that, "deally, the runner
who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like
a ghost in a real setting." While running, Oates mentally envisions scenes
in her novels and works out structural problems in already-written drafts; she
formulated the germ of her novel You Must Remember This (1987) while
running, when she "glanced up and saw the ruins of a railroad
bridge", which reminded her of "a mythical upstate New York
city".
In 1973, Oates began keeping a detailed journal documenting her personal
and literary life; it eventually grew to "more than 4,000 single-spaced
typewritten pages". In 2008, Oates said she had "moved away from
keeping a formal journal" and instead preserves copies of her e-mails.
Oates is a member of the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation. She is also a member of Mensa.
From her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964, up to Kindred Passions in
1987, Oates built up a literary corpus that mixes Gothic estrangement with high
social observation. Her works contain the typical elements of this type of
tale: unconscious forces, seduction, incest, violence, and rape, sometimes to
the point of sensationalism. She has written in a variety of genres, eras and
landscapesthus, she has works settled
in a Faulkner-like Eden County, an imaginary
area of upstate New York; in academia; in the Detroit
slums and the Pennsylvania backwoods. But her works are not
mere renderings of unusual experiences in far away places, both in space and
time: novels such as A Bloodsmoor Romance, The Mysteries
of Wintherthurn and Kindred Passions contain strong
feminist overtones and use of the Gothic device to explore the ambiguities of
gender and the sexual bases of fantasy.
Oates writes in longhand, working from "8 till 1 every day, then again
for two or three hours in the evening." Her subsequent prolificacy has
become one of her best-known attributes; The New York Times wrote in 1989 that
Oates's "name is synonymous with productivity", and in 2004, The Guardian
noted that "Nearly every review of an Oates book, it seems, begins with a
list [of the number of books she has published]". Critics have criticized
Oates for the level of her output, most notably James Wolcott,
who published an article in the September 1982 issue of Harper's Magazine
titled "Stop me before I write again: Six hundred more pages by Joyce
Carol Oates." In the review, Wolcott wrote that Oates "slop[s] words
across a page like a washerwoman flinging soiled water across the
cobblestones", and suggested that Oates's productivity was the result of
an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In a journal entry written in the 1970s, Oates sarcastically addressed her
critics, writing, "So many books! so many! Obviously JCO has a full career
behind her, if one chooses to look at it that way; many more titles and she
might as well... what?...give up all hopes for a 'reputation'?[...]but I work
hard, and long, and as the hours roll by I seem to create more than I
anticipate; more, certainly, than the literary world allows for a 'serious'
writer. Yet I have more stories to tell, and more novels[...]".In The New York Review of Books in 2007, Michael Dirda
suggested that disparaging criticism of Oates "derives from reviewer's
angst: How does one judge a new book by Oates when one is not familiar with
most of the backlist? Where does one start?"
Several publications have published lists of what they deem the best Joyce
Carol Oates books, designed to help introduce readers to the author's daunting
oeuvre. In a 2003 article titled "Joyce Carol Oates for dummies", The Rocky Mountain News recommended
starting with her early short stories and the novels A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them
(1969), Wonderland (1971), Black Water (1992), and Blonde
(2000). In 2006, The Times listed them, On Boxing (1987), Black
Water, and (2006) as "The Pick
of Joyce Carol Oates". In 2007, Entertainment Weekly listed their
Oates "favorites" as Wonderland, Black Water, Blonde,
I'll Take You There (2002), and The
Falls (2004). In 2003, Oates herself said that she thinks she will be
remembered for, and would most want a first-time Oates reader to read, them
and Blonde, though she added that "I could as easily have chosen a
number of titles."
Winner:
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