Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a prominent American author born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York. Raised in a rural, Catholic, working-class family, she developed a writing career marked by a prolific output and a diverse range of genres, including novels, short stories, poetry, and critical works. Oates first gained recognition in her twenties and has since established herself as a significant figure in contemporary American literature, often exploring themes of violence, social class, and the human condition.
She attended Syracuse University and later earned a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin, where she began her writing journey. Throughout her career, Oates has published numerous acclaimed works, including the National Book Award-winning novel "them" and the Pulitzer Prize finalist "Blonde." Her literature often reflects her upbringing and the American landscape, with a particular focus on the Detroit area.
Oates has received multiple awards, including the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and continues to write vigorously into her eighties. Despite mixed critical reception regarding her prolific nature and narrative style, she remains a central figure in discussions of American literature, with some scholars likening her work to that of William Faulkner.
Joyce Carol Oates
American novelist
- Born: June 16, 1938
- Place of Birth: Lockport, New York
Biography
While still in her twenties, Joyce Carol Oates was recognized as an important writer. After decades of consistent publication, her place in the first rank of contemporary American authors has been assured. Born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, Oates was reared in a rural, Catholic, working-class family. Her father, Frederick, was a tool-and-die designer who quit school in the seventh grade to go to work. Her mother, the former Caroline Bush, was a homemaker. Oates attended a one-room elementary school, the junior high in Lockport, and a high school outside Buffalo. She has used few of her childhood experiences, but she has frequently used the locale of Erie County, New York, which she ironically fictionalizes as “Eden County.”
Oates received a New York State Regents’ Scholarship that allowed her to attend Syracuse University. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and class valedictorian in 1960; she majored in English with a minor in philosophy. As an undergraduate, she was a cowinner of first place in Mademoiselle’s college fiction contest. In 1961, she completed a master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin. It was there that she met and married Raymond J. Smith. After a brief stay in Texas, the couple accepted teaching positions in Detroit: Oates at the University of Detroit and Smith at Wayne State University. In the next four years, Oates published two collections of short stories and her first novel, With Shuddering Fall. In 1966, Smith accepted a position at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. A year later Oates began teaching there as well. In 1967, Oates received the first of many O. Henry Awards for her story “In the Region of Ice.”
During her eleven years at the University of Windsor, Oates published eight novels, eight collections of short stories, four collections of poems, three critical works, and numerous journal articles. She and her husband also founded Ontario Review: A North American Journal of the Arts. Despite her lengthy Canadian residence, Oates’s fiction has focused on American subjects and characters. The Detroit area was a particularly important inspiration, a symbol of violence and energy that Oates used as the setting for some of her most forceful work, including them, which earned for her the National Book Award in 1970 and helped establish her reputation as a master of psychological realism.
In 1978, the couple moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Oates accepted a position at Princeton University as writer-in-residence. In the 1980s, Oates published a series of novels in the mystery/romance genre, beginning with Bellefleur. She then returned to mainstream novels that featured characters who, like Oates herself, came of age in upstate New York in the 1950s. These novels, Marya, You Must Remember This, and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, also continue to explore the troubled and violent underside of American life within the context of race and social class. Several novels in the 1990s were inspired by real-life events: Black Water is based on a political scandal, Foxfire concerns the social problem of girl gangs, Zombie goes inside the mind of a serial killer, and Blonde, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize as well as a National Book Award, fictionalizes the life of Marilyn Monroe. In other novels, Oates examines social mores through the fates of families: The best seller We Were the Mulvaneys tells the saga of a prominent family’s downfall following the rape of a daughter, while My Heart Laid Bare presents an epic about a family of confidence artists in nineteenth and early twentieth century America.
Most of Oates’s fiction portrays the individual’s struggle to balance self and community in a violent and amoral society. The pessimism of her early novels earned for her a reputation as an eccentric gothicist, but her later work, although still marked by depictions of horror, has offered greater hope for transcendence. She has been an outspoken defender of realism and narrative form and has viewed the antinarrative experimentation of much contemporary fiction as an example of anachronistic, masculine egocentricity that ignores the necessary connection between writer and reader. Between the 2000s and the end of the 2010s, she continued to publish prolifically, including the novels The Falls (2004), The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), Carthage (2014), A Book of American Martyrs (2017), and My Life as a Rat (2019). At the same time, she put out numerous collections of short stories, one of which, 2014's Lovely, Dark, Deep, became a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and received further praise and recognition for her work. A seminal moment came in 2010 when she received a National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Having begun serving as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, around 2016, in addition to Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. (2020), the early 2020s saw the release of the novels Breathe (2021) and Babysitter (2022). Her 2021 collection of poetry, American Melancholy, also earned praise overall. Oates, who continued to write into her eighties, published the novel Butcher in 2024 about a misogynistic gynecologist, as well as the short-story collection Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense. Oats won the Fitzgerald Prize in 2024.
No clear consensus on Oates’s place in American literature exists. Some scholars, troubled by her prolifically and popularity, see her work as careless and repetitive. She has also been criticized for her reliance on action and traditional narrative forms. Others, however, have compared her body of work to that of William Faulkner and argue that she has established herself as among the greatest contemporary American authors.
Author Works
Long Fiction
With Shuddering Fall, 1964
A Garden of Earthly Delights, 1967
Expensive People, 1968
them, 1969
Wonderland, 1971
Do with Me What You Will, 1973
The Assassins: A Book of Hours, 1975
Childwold, 1976
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey, 1976
Son of the Morning, 1978
Unholy Loves, 1979
Cybele, 1979
Bellefleur, 1980
Angel of Light, 1981
A Bloodsmoor Romance, 1982
Mysteries of Winterthurn, 1984
Solstice, 1985
Marya: A Life, 1986
Lives of the Twins, 1987 (as Rosamond Smith)
You Must Remember This, 1987
American Appetites, 1989
Soul/Mate, 1989 (as Smith)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, 1990
I Lock My Door upon Myself, 1990
Nemesis, 1990 (as Smith)
The Rise of Life on Earth, 1991
Black Water, 1992
Snake Eyes, 1992 (as Smith)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, 1993
What I Lived For, 1994
You Can’t Catch Me, 1995 (as Smith)
Zombie, 1995
We Were the Mulvaneys, 1996
First Love, 1996
Man Crazy, 1997
My Heart Laid Bare, 1998
Broke Heart Blues, 1999
Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon, 1999 (as Smith)
Blonde, 2000
The Barrens, 2001 (as Smith)
Middle Age: A Romance, 2001
Beasts, 2002
I'll Take You There, 2002
The Tattooed Girl, 2003
Rape: A Love Story, 2003
Take Me, Take Me with You, 2003 (as Lauren Kelly)
The Falls, 2004
Missing Mom, 2005
The Stolen Heart, 2005 (as Kelly)
The Corn Maiden: A Love Story, 2005
Black Girl / White Girl, 2006
Blood Mask, 2006 (as Kelly)
The Gravedigger's Daughter, 2007
My Sister, My Love, 2008
Little Bird of Heaven, 2009
A Fair Maiden, 2010
Patricide, 2012
Mudwoman, 2012
The Rescuer, 2012
Daddy Love, 2013
The Accursed, 2013
Carthage, 2014
The Sacrifice, 2014
Jack of Spades, 2015
The Man without a Shadow, 2016
A Book of American Martyrs, 2017
Hazards of Time Travel, 2018
My Life as a Rat, 2019
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars., 2020
Breathe, 2021
Babysitter, 2022
48 Clues Into the Disappearance of My Sister, 2022
Butcher, 2024
Short Fiction
By the North Gate, 1963
Upon the Sweeping Flood, 1966
The Wheel of Love, 1970
Marriages and Infidelities, 1972
The Goddess and Other Women, 1974
The Hungry Ghosts, 1974
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, 1974
The Poisoned Kiss, 1975
The Seduction, 1975
Crossing the Border, 1976
Night-Side, 1977
All the Good People I’ve Left Behind, 1978
The Lamb of Abyssalia, 1979
A Sentimental Education, 1980
Last Days, 1984
Raven’s Wing, 1986
The Assignation, 1988
Heat, and Other Stories, 1990
Where Is Here?, 1992
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, 1994
Will You Always Love Me?, 1994
The Collector of Hearts, 1998
Faithless: Tales of Transgression, 2001
I Am No One You Know, 2004
The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, 2006
High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories, 1966–2006, 2006
The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, 2007
Wild Nights!, 2008
Dear Husband, 2009
Sourland, 2010
Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, 2011
The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, 2011
Black Dahlia and White Rose, 2012
Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong, 2013
High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread, 2014
Lovely, Dark, Deep, 2014
The Crawl Space, 2016
The Doll Master and Other Tales, 2016
Night, Neon: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, 2021
The (Other) You, 2021
Extenuating Circumstances, 2022
Zero Sum, 2023
Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense, 2024
Drama
Miracle Play, pr. 1974
Three Plays, pb. 1980
In Darkest America: Two Plays, pb. 1991
I Stand Before You Naked, pb. 1991
Twelve Plays, pb. 1991
The Perfectionist, and Other Plays, pb. 1995
New Plays, pb. 1998
Dr. Magic: Six One-Act Plays, pb. 2004
Poetry
Women in Love, 1968
Anonymous Sins, and Other Poems, 1969
Love and Its Derangements, 1970
Angel Fire, 1973
The Fabulous Beasts, 1975
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money, 1978
Invisible Woman: Newand Selected Poems, 1970-1982, 1982
The Luxury of Sin, 1984
The Time Traveler, 1989
Tenderness, 1996
American Melancholy, 2021
Nonfiction
The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature, 1972
The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence, 1973
New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature, 1974
Contraries: Essays, 1981
The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews, 1983
On Boxing, 1987
(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, 1988
George Bellows: American Artist, 1995
Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose, 1999
The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, 2003
Uncensored: Views and (Re)views, 2005
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982, 2007
In the Absence of Mentors/Monsters, 2009
In Rough Country, 2010
A Widow's Story, 2011
The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age, 2015
Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life, 2016
Children’s/Young Adult Literature
Come Meet Muffin!, 1998
Great Ghost Stories, 1998 (compiled by Peter Glassman)
Big Mouth and Ugly Girl, 2002
Small Avalanches and Other Stories, 2003
Where Is Little Reynard?, 2003
Freaky Green Eyes, 2003
Sexy, 2005
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away, 2006
Naughty Chérie!, 2008
Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You, 2012
The New Kitten, 2019
Edited Texts
Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction, 1972
The Best American Short Stories 1979, 1979 (with Shannon Ravenel)
Night Walks: A Bedside Companion, 1982
First Person Singular: Writers on Their Craft, 1983
The Best American Essays, 1991
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, 1992
American Gothic Tales, 1996
Snapshots: Twentieth Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, 2000 (with Janet Berliner)
Bibliography
Bastian, Katherine. Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories: Between Tradition and Innovation. Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Lang, 1983.
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: Twayne, 1979.
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Easterly, Joan. “The Shadow of a Satyr in Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Fall, 1990): 537-543.
Johnson, Greg. “A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates’s First Collection.” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (Winter, 1993): 1-14.
Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998.
Johnson, Greg. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1994.
Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Marchaese, David. "Joyce Carol Oats Figured Out the Secret to Immortality." The New York Times, 16 July 2023, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/magazine/joyce-carol-oates-interview.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.
Merkin, Daphne. "Butcher Tells the Mostly True Story of a Very Bad Gynecologist." The New York Times, 21 May 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/books/review/butcher-joyce-carol-oates.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "Joyce Carol Oates Doesn't Prefer Blondes." Interview by Katy Waldman. The New Yorker, 25 Sept. 2022, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/joyce-carol-oates-doesnt-prefer-blondes. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.
Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine Usher Henderson. Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Robson, Leo. "The Unruly Genius of Joyce Carol Oates." The New Yorker, 29 June 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-unruly-genius-of-joyce-carol-oates. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.
Wagner, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.
Wesley, Marilyn. Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993.