Joyce Carol Oates

From Vero - Wikipedia
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Infobox writer Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award for her novel Them (1969),<ref name=nba1970 /> two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).

Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Early life and education

Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent,<ref name="aida"/><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer.<ref name="aida">Template:Cite news</ref> She grew up on her parents' farm outside the town.

Her brother, Fred Jr., and sister, Lynn Ann, were born in 1943 and 1956, respectively. Lynn Ann has autism<ref name="aida"/> and is institutionalized, and Oates has not seen her since 1971.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York.<ref name="ew"/> She characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status",<ref name="aida"/> but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence".<ref name="echo">Template:Cite web</ref> Her widowed paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside (née Morningstar), lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce.<ref name="ew">Template:Cite magazine</ref> After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that Blanche's father had killed himself. Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007).<ref name="ew"/>

Violence marred the lives of Oates and her recent ancestors: Oates's mother's biological father was murdered in 1917, which led to Oates mother's informal adoption. At age fourteen, Oates's paternal grandmother Blanche survived an attempted murder-suicide at the hands of her own father. He did kill himself.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> When Oates was a child, her next-door neighbor pleaded guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica Correctional Facility.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child.<ref name="aida"/> She became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!"<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose "influences remain very deep".<ref name="milazzo">Template:Cite book</ref>

Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter.<ref name="ew"/> Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools<ref name="aida"/> and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> She was the first in her family to complete high school.<ref name="aida"/>

As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.<ref>AMERICA'S MOST CREATIVE TEENS NAMED AS NATIONAL 2016 SCHOLASTIC ART & WRITING AWARDS RECIPIENTS, Scholastic Inc., Newsroom; accessed May 22, 2018.</ref>

University

Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined the Phi Mu fraternity for women. She found Syracuse to be "a very exciting place academically and intellectually", and trained herself by "writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them".<ref name="parisseventy">Template:Cite news</ref> It was at this point that Oates began reading the work of Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O'Connor, and she noted, "these influences are still quite strong, pervasive".<ref name="milazzo"/> At the age of 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960,<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961. She was a Ph.D. student at Rice University but left to become a full-time writer.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Evelyn Shrifte, president of the Vanguard Press, met Oates soon after Oates received her master's degree. "She was fresh out of school, and I thought she was a genius", Shrifte said. Vanguard published Oates' first book, the short-story collection By the North Gate, in 1963.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Career

The Vanguard Press published Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was 26 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".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> It has been anthologized many times and adapted as a 1985 film, Smooth Talk, which starred 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?"<ref name="tucky">Truman, Cheryl. "Author Joyce Carol Oates is always at her finest" Template:Webarchive (reprint), Lexington Herald-Leader, 2008. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref>

Oates in 1972, while in Canada

Another early short story, "In a Region of Ice" (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1966<ref name=ohenrywinners/>), features a young, gifted Jewish-American student. It dramatizes his drift into protest against the world of education and the sober, established society of his parents, his depression, and eventually murder-suicide. It was inspired by a real-life incident (as were several of her works) and Oates had been acquainted with the model of her protagonist. She revisited this subject in the title story of her collection Last Days: Stories (1984). "In the Region of Ice" won the first of her two O. Henry Awards.<ref name=ohenrywinners/>

Oates’s second novel was A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), first of the so-called Wonderland Quartet published by Vanguard 1967–71. All were finalists for the annual National Book Award. The third novel in the series, them (1969), won the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction.<ref name=nba1970/> It is set in Detroit during a time span from the 1930s to the 1960s, most of it in black ghetto neighborhoods, and deals openly with crime, drugs, and racial and class conflicts. Again, some of the key characters and events were based on real people whom Oates had known or heard of during her years in the city. Since then, she has published an average of two books a year. Frequent topics in her work include rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, female childhood and adolescence, and occasionally the "fantastic".<ref>Kort, Carol (2000), A Biographical Dictionary A to Z of American Women Writers, pp. 158 (Facts on File).</ref> 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?"<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1990, Oates discussed her novel, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, which also deals with themes of racial tension, and described "the experience of writing [it]" as "so intense it seemed almost electric".<ref>Spencer, Stuart http://bombsite.com/issues/31/articles/1310 Template:Webarchive, BOMB Magazine Spring 1990. Retrieved July 19, 2011.</ref> 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.Template:Citation needed 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.<ref name="echo"/>

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 2001.<ref name="tucky" /> We Were the Mulvaneys was eventually turned into a TV movie, which was nominated for several awards. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oates wrote several books, mostly suspense novels, under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.<ref name="forswears">Template:Cite news</ref>

Since at least the early 1980s, Oates has been rumored to be a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature by oddsmakers and critics.<ref name="nybooks" /> Her papers, held at Syracuse University, include 17 unpublished short stories and four unpublished or unfinished novellas. Oates has said that most of her early unpublished work was "cheerfully thrown away".<ref name="The Madness of Scholarship">Template:Cite news</ref>

One review of Oates's 1970 story collection The Wheel of Love characterized her as an author "of considerable talent" but at that time "far from being a great writer".<ref>Featured Author: Joyce Carol Oates. With Reviews and Articles, nytimes.com, September 21, 1997.</ref>

Oates's 2006 short story "Landfill" was criticized because it drew on the death, several months earlier, of John A. Fiocco Jr., a 19-year-old New Jersey college student.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In 1998, Oates received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, which is given annually to recognize outstanding achievement in American literature.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Ontario Review

Oates founded The Ontario Review, a literary magazine, in 1974 in Canada, with Raymond J. Smith, her husband and fellow graduate student, who would eventually become a professor of 18th-century literature.<ref name="ew"/> Smith served as editor of this venture, and Oates served as associate editor.<ref name="obit">"Raymond Smith, 77, Founder and Editor of Literary Journal", The New York Times, February 27, 2008. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref> The magazine's mission, according to Smith, the editor, was to bridge the literary and artistic culture of the US and Canada: "We tried to do this by publishing writers and artists from both countries, as well as essays and reviews of an intercultural nature."<ref>"Ontario Review Press". Celestial Timepiece – The Joyce Carol Oates Home Page. University of San Francisco. Retrieved April 4, 2014.</ref> In 1978, Sylvester & Orphanos published A Sentimental Education, a collection of short stories.<ref>Luckenbill, Dan (1990). Sylvester & Orphanos: catalog of an exhibit, October–December 1990. UCLA. Retrieved March 13, 2018.</ref>

In 1980, Oates and Smith founded Ontario Review Books, an independent publishing house. In 2004, Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds – both 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 it – we trade and we talk about our reading at meal times ...".<ref name="aida"/>

Teaching career

Oates taught in Beaumont, Texas, for a year, then moved to Detroit in 1962, where she began teaching at the University of Detroit. Influenced by the Vietnam War, the 1967 Detroit race riots, and a job offer, Oates moved across the river into Canada in 1968 with her husband, to a teaching position at the University of Windsor in Ontario.<ref name="aida"/> In 1978, she moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and began teaching at Princeton University.

Among others, Oates influenced Jonathan Safran Foer, who took an introductory writing course with Oates in 1995 as a Princeton undergraduate.<ref name="nash">Nash, Margo. "Learning to Write From the Masters", The New York Times, December 1, 2002. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref> Foer recalled later that Oates took an interest in his writing and his "most important of writerly qualities, energy",<ref name="ident">Birnbaum, Robert. "Jonathan Safran Foer: Author of Everything is Illuminated talks with Robert Birnbaum", IdentityTheory.com, May 26, 2006. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref> noting that she was "the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that."<ref name="ident"/> Oates served as advisor for Foer's senior thesis, which was an early version of his novel Everything Is Illuminated (published to acclaim in 2002).<ref name="nash"/>

Oates retired from teaching at Princeton in 2014 and was honored at a retirement party in November of that year.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Oates has taught creative short fiction at UC Berkeley since 2016 and offers her course in spring semesters.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Views

Religion

Oates was raised Catholic, but as of 2007 she identified as an atheist.<ref name="humanist">Template:Cite journal</ref> In an interview with Commonweal magazine, Oates stated: "I think of religion as a kind of psychological manifestation of deep powers, deep imaginative, mysterious powers which are always with us."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Politics

Oates supports gun control.<ref name="salon.com">Template:Cite web</ref> She was a vocal critic of US President Donald Trump and his policies during his first term, both in public and on Twitter.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Oates opposed the shuttering of cultural institutions on Trump's first inauguration day as a protest against the President, stating that this "would only hurt artists. Rather, cultural institutions should be sanctuaries for those repelled by the inauguration."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

In January 2019, Oates stated that "Trump is like a figurehead, but I think what really controls everything is just a few really wealthy families or corporations."<ref name="ellethinkstrump">Template:Cite news</ref>

On November 8, 2025, Oates took to X (formerly Twitter),<ref name="Placido">Template:Cite news</ref> posting a critique of a user that most readers assumed to be X owner Elon Musk, though he is not named specifically. Her critique read<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

"So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated , uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the “most wealthy person in the world.”

Extensive online discourse ensued, with coverage of the "feud" published in Newsweek, Forbes, Slate Magazine, Literary Hub, and other periodicals. LitHub's story included the headline "Elon Musk Gets Roasted on His Own Platform by Joyce Carol Oates," observing that Oates' post gets "...at the heart of Elon’s broken humanity, itemizing with a surgeon’s precision that which he has so clearly lost, and will likely never regain." <ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Musk replied with a flurry of posts critiquing Oates' body of literary work and her use of punctuation in the original critical post,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> as well as seemingly adjusting the tone and content of subsequent posts in the following weeks to include more references to his media consumption and coworkers.<ref name="Placido"/>

Productivity

Joyce Carol Oates in 2004

Oates writes in longhand,<ref name="birnbaum">Birnbaum, Robert. "Personalities: Birnbaum v. Joyce Carol Oates", The Morning News, February 3, 2005. Retrieved October 30, 2008.</ref> working from "8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening."<ref name="nybooks">Dirda, Michael. ""The Wand of the Enchanter", The New York Review of Books, 54.20, December 20, 2007. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref> Her prolificacy has become one of her best-known attributes, although often discussed disparagingly.<ref name="nybooks" /> The New York Times wrote in 1989 that Oates's "name is synonymous with productivity."<ref>Parini, Jay (July 30, 1989)"The more they write, the more they write", The New York Times. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref> Martyn Bedford wrote in Literary Review that "perhaps she is a victim of her own productivity."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 2004, The Guardian noted that, "Nearly every review of an Oates book, it seems, begins with a list [of her publication totals]".<ref name="aida" />

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 […] ".<ref>Johnson, Greg, ed. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973–1982. New York: Ecco, 2007, p. 331.Template:ISBN?</ref> 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?"<ref name="nybooks"/>

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 body of work. In a 2003 article entitled "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).<ref>Davis, Duane. "Joyce Carol Oates for dummies", "Where to start", "Onto the novels" (series of articles), The Rocky Mountain News, June 13, 2003. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref> In 2006, The Times listed them, On Boxing (1987), Black Water, and High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006) as "The Pick of Joyce Carol Oates".<ref name="timesuk">Freeman, John. "Joyce Carol Oates, up close and personal", The Times, August 11, 2007. Retrieved October 28, 2008.</ref> In 2007, Entertainment Weekly listed its Oates favorites as Wonderland, Black Water, Blonde, I'll Take You There (2002), and The Falls (2004).<ref>"Book News: Daily Oates Consumption", Entertainment Weekly, July 6, 2007. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref> 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, although she "could as easily have chosen a number of titles."<ref>"Off the Page: Joyce Carol Oates", The Washington Post, October 24, 2003. Retrieved October 29, 2008.</ref>

In a 2025 interview with The New Yorker, the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg suggested that "a new [Oates] reader should begin with the collection High Lonesome." He also deemed the novels them, I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1990), and Blonde "essential" Oates works.<ref>"Garth Risk Hallberg's Essential Joyce Carol Oates", The New Yorker, January 15, 2025. Retrieved January 16, 2025.</ref>

Personal life

Oates in 2013

Oates met Raymond J. Smith, a fellow graduate student, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and they married in 1961.<ref name="ew" /> Smith became a professor of 18th-century literature and, later, an editor and publisher. Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds..." and "a very collaborative and imaginative marriage".<ref name="aida" /> Smith died of complications from pneumonia on February 18, 2008, and the death affected Oates profoundly.<ref name="obit" /> In April 2008, Oates wrote to an interviewer, "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really have very little energy [...] My marriageTemplate:Spndmy love for my husbandTemplate:Spndseems 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."<ref name="dispatch">Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

After six months of near suicidal grieving for Smith,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Oates met Charles Gross, a professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, at a dinner party at her home. In early 2009, Oates and Gross were married.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> On April 13, 2019, Oates announced via Twitter that Gross had died at the age of 83.<ref>Template:Cite tweet</ref>

As a diarist, Oates began keeping a detailed journal in 1973, documenting her personal and literary life; it eventually grew to "more than 4,000 single-spaced typewritten pages".<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In 2008, Oates said she had "moved away from keeping a formal journal" and instead preserved copies of her e-mails.<ref name="dispatch" />

As of 1999, Oates remained devoted to running, of which she has written: "Ideally, the runner who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting."<ref name="running">Oates, Joyce Carol. "Writers on Writing: To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet", The New York Times, July 18, 1999. Retrieved October 30, 2008.</ref> 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 the right place".<ref name="running" />

Oates was a member of the board of trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1997 to 2016.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She is an honorary member of the Simpson Literary Project, which annually awards the $50,000 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize to a mid-career writer. She has served as the Project's artist-in-residence several times.<ref name=chronicle>Kosman, Joshia (May 12, 2020) "Bay Area author and psychiatrist Daniel Mason wins $50,000 Joyce Carol Oates Prize" San Francisco Chronicle</ref>

Bibliography

Template:Main

Oates's extensive bibliography contains poetry, plays, criticism, short stories, eleven novellas, and sixty novels, including Them, Blonde, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, Black Water, Mudwoman, Carthage, The Man Without a Shadow, and A Book of American Martyrs. She has published several novels under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Awards and honors

Template:Div col

Winner

Template:Div col end

Finalist

Template:Div col

  • 1993: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Black Water<ref name=pulitzer>"Fiction". Past winners & finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved April 14, 2012.</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  • 1995: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – What I Lived For<ref name=pulitzer />
  • 2001: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Blonde<ref name=pulitzer />
  • 2015: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories<ref name=pulitzer />
  • 2015: Killer Nashville Awards (Silver Falchion Award - Collection) - High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Template:Div col end

Nominated

Template:Div col

Template:Div col end

References

Template:Reflist

Template:Wikiquote Template:Commons category

Template:Joyce Carol Oates Template:NBA for Fiction 1950–1974 Template:Bram Stoker Award Best Novel Template:Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement Template:World Fantasy Award Best Short Fiction Template:Authority control

Retrieved from "https://wiki.sarg.dev/index.php?title=Joyce_Carol_Oates&oldid=205481"