name | Joyce Carol Oates |
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birth date | June 16, 1938 |
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birth place | Lockport, New York, U.S. |
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occupation | Novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, literary critic, professor, editor |
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nationality | American |
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period | 1963 – present |
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debut works | Debut short story collection: ''By the North Gate'' (1963)Debut novel: ''With Shuddering Fall'' (1964)Debut poetry collection: ''Anonymous Sins and Other Poems'' (1969)Debut play: ''Miracle Play'' (1974) |
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influences | Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Desmond Hogan, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor, Edgar Allan Poe |
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influenced | Chris Bohjalian, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shannon Bramer, Brandon M. Stickney |
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awards | 1967 O. Henry Award1973 O. Henry Award1970 National Book Award 2010 National Humanities Medal |
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footnotes | }} |
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Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. 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.
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.
Biography
Early life and education
Oates was born in
Lockport,
New York to Carolina Oates, a homemaker, and Frederic Oates, a tool and die designer. She was raised
Catholic but is now an
atheist. Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of
Millersport, New York, and characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status". Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce. After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that Blanche's father had killed himself and Blanche had subsequently concealed her
Jewish heritage; Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the 2007 novel ''
The Gravedigger's Daughter''. A brother, Fred Junior, was born in 1943, and a sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely
autistic, was born in 1956.
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 Brontë, and Emily Brontë, 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 South 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. Oates found Syracuse "a very exciting place academically and intellectually", and trained herself by "writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them." It was not until this point that Oates began reading the work of D. H. Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka, though, she noted, "these influences are still quite strong, pervasive." At the age of nineteen, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by ''Mademoiselle''. Oates graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in English as valedictorian in 1960, and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961.
Evelyn Shrifte, president of the Vanguard Press, met Oates soon after she received her master's degree. "She was fresh out of school, and I thought she was a genius," Shrifte said. Oates' first book, the short-story collection ''By the North Gate'', was published by Vanguard in 1963.
Literary 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." The story is loosely based on the serial killer
Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson". It has been anthologized several times and
adapted as a film, ''
Smooth Talk'' starring
Laura Dern (1985). In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?". Another early short story, "In a Region of Ice" (''The Atlantic Monthly'', August 1966), 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-cum-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'' (1985). "In a Region of Ice" won the first of her two
O. Henry Awards. Her second novel was ''A Garden of Earthly Delights'' (1967), first of the so-called Wonderland Quartet published by Vanguard 1967 to 1971. All were finalists for the annual National Book Award.
Oates's novel ''them'' (1969) won the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction. 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/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 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?" In 1990 she 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". 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.
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. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oates wrote several books, mostly mystery novels, under the pen names "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly".
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 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".
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".
Teaching career
Oates taught in
Beaumont,
Texas, for a year before moving 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, in 1968 Oates moved with her husband across the river to
Ontario, and teaching positions at the
University of Windsor. In 1978, she moved to Princeton and began teaching at
Princeton University in
New Jersey.
In 1995, Princeton undergraduate Jonathan Safran Foer took an introductory writing course with Oates, who took an interest in Foer's writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy". Foer later recalled 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." Oates served as the advisor to Foer's senior thesis, an early version of his novel ''Everything Is Illuminated'', which was published to wide acclaim in 1999.
Personal life
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 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[...]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 marriage—my love for my husband—seems 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." In early 2009 Oates married Professor Charles Gross, of the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton. who had been married twice previously. Oates met Gross at a dinner party at her home six months after Smith's death.
Oates is devoted to running, and has written that, "[i]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 the right place".
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.
Productivity
Oates writes in
longhand, working from "8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening." Her 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]".
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 ''High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966-2006'' (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."
For reference to her personal life and recent book "A Widow's Story: A Memoir" see the PBS/News Hour show originally broadcast on February 3, 2011.
Select awards and honors
''Winner'':
1967:
O. Henry Award — "In the Region of Ice"
1968: M. L. Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters — ''A Garden of Earthly Delights''
1970:
National Book Award for Fiction — ''
them''
1973: O. Henry Award — "The Dead"
1990: Rea Award for the Short Story
1996: Bram Stoker Award for Novel — ''Zombie''
1996: PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story
2002:
Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
2003: Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement (''The Kenyon Review'')
2005: Prix Femina Etranger — ''The Falls''
2006: Chicago Tribune Literary Prize (''
Chicago Tribune'')
2006: Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters,
Mount Holyoke College
2009:
Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, NBCC
2010:
National Humanities Medal
2011: Honorary Doctor of Arts,
University of Pennsylvania
2011: World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction — ''Fossil-Figures''
2012: Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Oregon State University
''Nominated'':
1963ff O. Henry Award — Special Award for Continuing Achievement (1970), five Second Prize (1964 to 1989), two First Prize (above) among 29 nominations
1968: National Book Award for Fiction — ''A Garden of Earthly Delights''
1969: National Book Award — ''Expensive People''
1972: National Book Award — ''Wonderland''
1990: National Book Award — ''Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart''
1992: National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction — ''Black Water''
1993: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — ''Black Water''
1995: Pulitzer Prize — ''What I Lived For''
1995: PEN/Faulkner Award — ''What I Lived For''
2000: National Book Award — ''Blonde''
2001: Pulitzer Prize — ''Blonde''
2007: National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction — ''The Gravedigger's Daughter''
2007: National Book Critics Circle Award, Memoir/Autobiography — ''The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982''
Bibliography
''The Crosswicks Horror'' (Forthcoming)
Short story collections
''By the North Gate'' (1963)
''Upon the Sweeping Flood And Other Stories'' (1966)
''The Wheel of Love and Other Stories'' (1970)
*"How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction"
*"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
''Marriages and Infidelities'' (1972)
''The Goddess and Other Women'' (1974)
''The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies'' (1974)
''Night-Sides'' (1977)
''Where is Here?'' (1992)
''Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque'' (1994)
''Demon and other tales'' (1996)
''Will You Always Love Me? And Other Stories'' (1996)
''The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque'' (1998)
''Faithless: Tales of Transgression'' (2001)
''I Am No One You Know: Stories'' (2004)
''The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense'' (2006)
''High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966-2006'' (2006)
''The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense'' (2007)
''Wild Nights!'' (2008)
''Dear Husband'' (2009)
''Sourland: Stories'' (2010)
''Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense'' (2011)
''The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares'' (2011)
References
External links
''Websites''
Celestial Timepiece: The Joyce Carol Oates Home Page – Joyce Carol Oates's official web site.
''Papers''
Papers of Joyce Carol Oates at Syracuse University
''Biographies'':
Heath Anthology of American Literature Biography
Bartleby biography
''Interviews and Speeches'':
Joyce Carol Oates to graduates: we do love our students- ''
Boston Globe''
PBS Interview
Interview with the ''Oxonian Review'' in June 2010
2011 radio interview at The Bat Segundo Show
''Miscellaneous'':
Category:1938 births
Category:Living people
Category:20th-century novelists
Category:21st-century novelists
Category:American atheists
Category:American dramatists and playwrights
Category:American essayists
Category:American humanists
Category:American novelists
Category:American poets
Category:American short story writers
Category:American women writers
Category:Gothic fiction
Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Category:National Book Award winners
Category:National Humanities Medal recipients
Category:O. Henry Award winners
Category:People from Lockport, New York
Category:Princeton University faculty
Category:Prix Femina Étranger winners
Category:Syracuse University alumni
Category:University of Detroit Mercy faculty
Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni
ar:جويس كارول أوتس
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