Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates, born in 1938, American author, known for her novels that portray violence in American life. Born in Lockport, New York, Oates received a B.A. degree in English from Syracuse University; an M.A. degree, also in English, from the University of Wisconsin; and continued her graduate studies at Rice University. She taught at the University of Detroit from 1961 to 1967 and at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, from 1967 to 1978. In 1978 Oates began teaching in the creative writing program at Princeton University. She was named Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities, at Princeton, in 1988.

Oates’s first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964. Her novel them (1969) won the National Book Award in 1970 and is the third book in a trilogy that also includes A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Expensive People (1968). Oates writes in many genres, often incorporating elements of naturalism by presenting characters who respond to internal and external forces that they can neither understand nor control. Some of her writing veers toward the Gothic in its focus on the mysterious and the horrifying. Violence, often male and sexual, consistently plays a prominent role in the lives of her characters. Her work often contains feminist overtones.

Oates is a wide-ranging and extremely prolific writer. Her many novels include Blonde (2000), which reimagines the life of motion-picture sex symbol Marilyn Monroe; Rape: A Love Story (2003), which attacks misogyny through its portrayal of the aftermath of sexual violence; Missing Mom (2005), which explores grief through the voice of a slain mother’s teenage daughter; and The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007), which celebrates resiliency through a young woman’s quest for identity as a first-generation American. Oates’s other novels include Bellefleur (1980), You Must Remember This (1988), Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990), Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), My Heart Laid Bare (1998), and My Sister, My Love (2008).

Oates’s nonfiction includes On Boxing (1987), George Bellows: American Artist (1995), and Uncensored: Views and (Re)views (2005). Her poems appear in Love and Its Derangements (1970), Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems (1982), and The Time Traveler (1987). Twelve Plays was published in 1991. Her short-story collections include By the North Gate (1963); Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966); Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1974); All the Good People I’ve Left Behind (1978); Where Is Here? (1994); Will You Always Love Me? (1996); The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (2006), which features women who are killers; High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006; and Wild Nights (2008). She has authored critical essays, young adult fiction, and children’s fiction. She has also published under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.