Everything about Joyce Carol Oates totally explained
Joyce Carol Oates (born
June 16 1938) is an
American author and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at
Princeton University, where she's taught since 1978.
She serves as associate editor for the
Ontario Review, a
literary magazine, and the Ontario Review Press, a literary book
publisher, both of which were edited by her late husband,
Raymond J. Smith.
Oates has also written under the
pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly."
Background and education
Oates was born in
Lockport, New York, and grew up in the New York countryside. She attended the same
one-room school her mother attended as a child.
Oates often remarks about receiving a copy of
Alice in Wonderland when she was a little girl, and how it affected her life very deeply, growing up on a farm with very few books.
Oates began to write stories with the typewriter she received from her grandmother when she was fourteen years old. She excelled in school, and she worked for her high school newspaper, called WISP, at Williamsville High School in
Williamsville, New York (now called
Williamsville South High School). Oates won a scholarship to attend
Syracuse University. She also won the "college short story" contest sponsored by
Mademoiselle when she was nineteen years old. After graduating as valedictorian from Syracuse in 1960 (where she was a member of
Phi Mu), Oates received her M.A. from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1961.
She is a member of
Mensa.
Career
Oates taught at the
University of Detroit, publishing her first novel,
With Shuddering Fall, when she was twenty-six years old. Her novel
them received the
National Book Award in 1970. She then started teaching at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, right across the river from Detroit in 1968 to 1978. Since then she's 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. She gained much attention for her book-length essay
On Boxing. Oates has also written several books, mostly mystery novels, under the
pen names Rosamond Smith and
Lauren Kelly. She also taught at the
University of Windsor in
Canada for ten years before moving to Princeton in 1978.
Her frequently anthologized short story "
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?",
(1966), was dedicated to
Bob Dylan.
Oates said she wrote the story after listening to Dylan's 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".
It was the basis for the film,
Smooth Talk, starring
Laura Dern.
Oates is a member of the Board of Trustees of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is frequently cited as a perennial "favorite" to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature by oddsmakers and critics.
Her papers, held at Syracuse University, include seventeen unpublished short stories and four unpublished or unfinished novellas. Oates has said that most of her early unpublished work was "cheerfully thrown away."
Oates' husband of forty-five years, Raymond J. Smith, died in February 2008.
Style and themes
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 landscapes -thus, she's 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.
Influences
In 2001, Oates stated that it was hard to begin tracing her literary influences, because "[t]here are so many." However, she's named several influences for her writing, both the content and her style. In her essay collection
The Faith of a Writer, Oates wrote that a gift of
Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when she was eight was "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!" She has also cited the influence of
Sylvia Plath,
Henry James,
Henry David Thoreau,
Flannery O'Connor,
Bob Dylan, and
William Faulkner. In her forays into gothic and horror fiction, Oates said she was "deeply influenced" by
Franz Kafka and feels "a writerly kinship" with
James Joyce.
2005: Prix Femina Etranger - The Falls
2001: Oprah's Book Club - We Were the Mulvaneys
1996: Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize - Zombie
1996: Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a novel - Zombie
1990: Rea Award for the Short Story
1990: Heidemann Award for one-act plays - Tone Clusters, co-winner
1970: National Book Award - them
1968: Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters - A Garden of Earthly Delights
1959: Mademoiselle college fiction award - In the Old World
Nominated:
2007: National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction - The Gravedigger's Daughter
2007: National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography - The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982
2006: Orange Prize For Fiction Longlist - Rape: A Love Story
2001: Pulitzer Prize - Blonde
2000: National Book Award - Blonde
1995: Pulitzer Prize - What I Lived For
1995: PEN/Faulkner Award - What I Lived For
1993: Pulitzer Prize - Black Water
1992: National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction - Black Water
1990: National Book Award - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
1972: National Book Award - Wonderland
1969: National Book Award - Expensive People
1968: National Book Award - A Garden of Earthly Delights
Bibliography
Novels
With Shuddering Fall (1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
Expensive People (1968)
them (1969)
Wonderland (1971)
Do with Me What You Will (1973)
(1975)
Childwold (1976)
Son of the Morning (1978)
Cybele (1979)
Unholy Loves (1979)
Bellefleur (1980)
Angel of Light (1981)
A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
Solstice (1985)
(1986)
You Must Remember This (1987)
American Appetites (1989)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)
(1993) (the basis for the 1996 film Foxfire)
What I Lived For (1994)
Zombie (1995) - Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel (1995)
We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
Man Crazy (1997)
My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
Broke Heart Blues (1999)
Blonde (2000)
(2001)
I'll Take You There (2002)
The Tattooed Girl (2003)
The Falls (2004)
Missing Mom (2005)
Black Girl / White Girl (2006)
The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007)
My Sister, My Love (2008)
A Fair Maiden (Forthcoming)
The Crosswicks Horror (Forthcoming)
Novels as "Rosamond Smith"
Lives of the Twins (1987) (U.K. title: Kindred Passions)
Soul/Mate (1989)
Nemesis (1990)
Snake Eyes (1992)
You Can't Catch Me (1995)
Double Delight (1997)
Starr Bright Will Be With you Soon (1999)
The Barrens (2001)
Novels as "Lauren Kelly"
Take Me, Take Me With You (2003)
The Stolen Heart (2005)
Blood Mask (2006)
Novellas
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)
I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1990)
The Rise of Life on Earth (1991)
Black Water (1992)
(1996)
Beasts (2002)
(2003)
(2005)
Short story collections
By the North Gate (1963)
Upon the Sweeping Flood And Other Stories (1966)
The Wheel of Love And Other Stories (1970)
Marriages and Infidelities (1972)
The Goddess and Other Women (1974)
(1974)
(1974)
The Poisoned Kiss And Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975)
The Seduction & Other Stories (1975)
(1976)
Night-Side (1977)
All the Good People I've Left Behind (1979)
(1980)
(1984)
Wild Saturday (1984)
(1986)
(1989)
Oates In Exile (1990)
Heat And Other Stories (1991)
Where Is Here? (1992)
(1993)
(1994)
Demon and other tales (1996)
Will You Always Love Me? And Other Stories (1996)
(1998)
(2001)
(2004)
(2006)
(2006)
(2007)
Wild Nights! (2008)
Drama
Miracle Play (1974)
Three Plays (1980)
In Darkest America (1991)
I Stand Before You Naked (1991)
Twelve Plays (1991) (including Black)
The Perfectionist and Other Plays (1995)
New Plays (1998)
Dr. Magic: Six One Act Plays (2004)
Essays and criticism
The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972)
The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence (1974)
New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)
Contraries: Essays (1981)
The Profane Art: Essays & 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 & (Re)views (2005)
Poetry
Women In Love and Other Poems (1968)
Anonymous Sins & 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: New and Selected Poems, 1970-1982 (1982)
The Time Traveler (1989)
Tenderness (1996)
The Coming Storm (Forthcoming)
Young adult fiction
Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002)
Small Avalanches and Other Stories (2003)
Freaky Green Eyes (2003)
Sexy (2005)
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (2006)
Children's fiction
Come Meet Muffin! (1998)
Where Is Little Reynard? (2003)
Quotes
"I come from people who didn't go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hard-working."
"I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life."
"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."
"The brain is a muscle" from Love and Its Derangements (1970)
"Revenge is living well, without you."Further Information
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