Joyce Carol Oates

One of the United States's most prolific and versatile contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) focuses upon the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern American society.

Oates was born into a working-class Catholic family outside Lockport, New York, and was raised amid a rural setting on her maternal grandparents' farm. She attended a one-room schoolhouse in Erie County, a parallel community to her fictitious Eden County where many of her works are set, and displayed an early interest in storytelling by drawing picture-tales before she could write. Oates has said that her childhood "was dull, ordinary, nothing people would be interested in," but has admitted that "a great deal frightened me." In 1953 at age fifteen, Oates wrote her first novel, though it was rejected by publishers who found its subject matter, which concerned the rehabilitation of a drug dealer, exceedingly depressing for adolescent audiences.

Oates began her academic career at Syracuse University and graduated from there as class valedictorian in 1960. In 1961 she received a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond Joseph Smith, an English educator. The following year, after beginning work on her doctorate in English, Oates inadvertently encountered one of her own stories in Margaret Foley's anthology Best American Short Stories. This discovery prompted Oates to write professionally, and in 1963 she published her first volume of short stories, By the North Gate (1963). Oates taught at the University of Detroit between 1961 and 1967. In 1967 she and her husband moved to Canada to teach at the University of Windsor, where together they founded the Ontario Review. Since leaving the University of Windsor in 1977, Oates has been writer-in-residence at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Oates's first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), fore-shadows her preoccupation with evil and violence in the story of a destructive romance between a teenage girl and a thirty-year-old stock car driver that ends with his death in an accident. Oates's best-known and critically acclaimed early novels form a trilogy exploring three distinct segments of American society. Critics attribute the naturalistic ambience of these works to the influence of such twentieth-century authors as William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell. Oates's first installment, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), is set in rural Eden County and chronicles the life of the daughter of a migrant worker who marries a wealthy farmer in order to provide for her illegitimate son. The woman's idyllic existence is destroyed, however, when the boy murders his stepfather and kills himself. In Expensive People (1967), the second work in the series, Oates exposes the superficial world of suburbanites whose preoccupation with material comforts reveals their spiritual poverty. The final volume in the trilogy, them (1969), which won the National Book Award for fiction, depicts the violence and degradation endured by three generations of an urban Detroit family. Critics acknowledge that Oates's experiences as a teacher in Detroit during the early 1960s contributed to her accurate rendering of the city and its social problems. Betty DeRamus stated: "Her days in Detroit did more for Joyce Carol Oates than bring her together with new people—it gave her a tradition to write from, the so-called American Gothic tradition of exaggerated horror and gloom and mysterious and violent incidents."

Oates's novels of the 1970s explore characters involved with various American professional and cultural institutions while interweaving elements of human malevolence and tragedy. Wonderland (1971), for example, depicts a brilliant surgeon who is unable to build a satisfying home life, resulting in estrangement from his wife, children, and society. Do with Me What You Will (1973) focuses upon a young attorney who is lauded by his peers for his devotion to liberal causes. The Assassins: A Book of Hours (1975) is a psychological tale which dramatizes the effects of the murder of a conservative politician on his wife and two brothers. Son of the Morning (1978) documents the rise and fall from grace of Nathan Vickery, an evangelist whose spirituality is alternately challenged and affirmed by various events in his life. Unholy Loves (1979) revolves around the lives of several faculty members of a small New York college. Considered the least emotionally disturbing of Oates's novels, Unholy Loves was praised for its indirect humor and gentle satire.

During the early 1980s, Oates published several novels that parody works by such nineteenth-century authors as Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Bellefleur (1980) follows the prescribed formula for a Gothic multigenerational saga, utilizing supernatural occurrences while tracing the lineage of an exploitative American family. Oates included explicit violence in this work; for example, a man deliberately crashes his plane into the Bellefleur mansion, killing himself and his family. A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) displays such elements of Gothic romance as mysterious kidnappings and psychic phenomena in the story of five maiden sisters living in rural Pennsylvania in the late 1800s. In Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), Oates borrowed heavily from the works of Poe as she explored the conventions of the nineteenth-century mystery novel. The protagonist of this work is a brilliant young detective who models his career after the exploits of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. While some critics viewed these works as whimsical, others, citing Oates's accomplished depiction of evil, maintained that they are significant literary achievements.

Oates's recent novels explore the nature and ramifications of obsession. Solstice (1985) revolves around a relationship between a young divorcee and an older woman that evolves into an emotional power struggle. In Marya: A Life (1986), a successful writer and academician attempts to locate her alcoholic mother, who had abused and later abandoned her as a child. Lives of the Twins (1987), which Oates wrote under the pseudonym of Rosamond Smith, presents a tale of love and erotic infatuation involving a woman, her lover, and her lover's twin brother. With You Must Remember This (1987), Oates returned to a naturalistic portrait of families under emotional and moral distress. Suicide attempts, violent beatings, disfiguring accidents, and incest figure prominently in this novel, which centers on an intense love affair between a former boxer and his adolescent niece. Set in Eden County and containing references to such historical events as Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign, the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage, and the Korean War, You Must Remember This earned high praise for its evocation of American life during the early 1950s. John Updike stated that this work "rallies all [of Oates's] strengths and is exceedingly fine—a storm of experience whose reality we cannot doubt, a fusion of fact and feeling, vision and circumstance which holds together, and holds us to it, through our terror and dismay."

Oates's works in other genres also address darker aspects of the human condition. Most critics contend that Oates's short fiction, for which she has twice received the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, is best suited for evoking the urgency and emotional power of her principal themes. Such collections as By the North Gate; Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America (1974); The Lamb of Abyssalia (1980); and Raven's Wing (1986) contain pieces that focus upon violent and abusive relationships between the sexes. One widely anthologized story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," a tale of female adolescence and sexual awakening, is considered a classic of modern short fiction and was adapted for film. Oates has also composed several dramas that were produced off-Broadway in New York and has published numerous volumes of poetry. In addition, she is a respected essayist and literary critic whose nonfiction works are praised for the logic and sensibility with which she examines a variety of subjects.

them chronicles three decades, beginning in 1937, in the life of the Wendall family. The novel "is partly made up of 'composite' characters and events, clearly influenced by the disturbances of the long hot summer of 1967," Oates acknowledges. She no longer suggests, as she did in the original author's note, that her protagonist Maureen Wendall was actually her former student. That author's note, later repudiated by Oates as a fiction in itself, describes the book as "a work of history in fictional form," and asserts that Maureen's remembrances shaped the story: "[The book] is based mainly upon Maureen's numerous recollections…. It is to her terrible obsession with her personal history that I owe the voluminous details of this novel." Although regarded as a self-contained work, them can also be considered the concluding volume in a trilogy that explores different subgroups of American society. The trilogy includes A Garden of Earthly Delights, about the migrant poor, and Expensive People, about the suburban rich. The goal of all three novels, as Oates explains in the Saturday Review, is to present a cross-section of "unusually sensitive—but hopefully representative—young men and women, who confront the puzzle of American life in different ways and come to different ends."

Further Reading

Allen, Mary, The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties, University of Illinois Press, 1974.

Authors in the News, Volume 1, Gale, 1976.

Bellamy, Joe David, editor, The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, University of Illinois Press, 1974.

Bender, Eileen, Joyce Carol Oates, Indiana University Press, 1987.

Bloom, Harold, editor, Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates, Chelsea House, 1987.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 9, 1978, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 19, 1981, Volume 33, 1985.

Creighton, Joanne V., Joyce Carol Oates, G. K. Hall, 1979. □

Joyce Carol Oates

Born: June 16, 1938
Lockport, New York
American writer and poet

One of the United States's most prolific (producing a lot of work) and versatile (producing a wide variety of work) contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates focuses upon the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern American society.

Early years

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, the oldest of Frederic and Caroline Oates's three children. The family lived on a farm owned by Caroline's parents. Joyce's father was a tool designer, and her mother was a housewife. Oates was a serious child who read a great deal. Even before she could write, she told stories by drawing pictures. She has said that her childhood "was dull, ordinary, nothing people would be interested in," but she has admitted that "a great deal frightened me."

In 1953, at age fifteen, Oates wrote her first novel, though it was rejected by publishers who found its subject matter, which concerned the rehabilitation (the restoring to a useful state) of a drug addict, too depressing for teenage audiences. After high school Oates won a scholarship to Syracuse University, where she studied English. Before her senior year she was the co-winner of a fiction contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. After graduating at the top of her class in 1960, Oates enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where she met Raymond Joseph Smith, an English professor. They were married in 1961.

Teaching and writing

In 1961, after Oates earned her master's degree and began work on her doctorate in English, she found one of her own stories in Margaret Foley's collection Best American Short Stories. Oates then decided on a writing career, and in 1963 she published her first volume of short stories, By the North Gate (1963). Oates also taught at the University of Detroit between 1961 and 1967. In 1967 she and her husband moved to Canada to teach at the University of Windsor, where together they founded the publication Ontario Review in 1974. After leaving the University of Windsor in 1977, Oates became writer-in-residence and later a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Oates's first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), shows her interest in evil and violence in the story of a romance between a teenage girl and a thirty-year-old stock car driver that ends with his death in an accident. Oates's best-known early novels form a trilogy (three-volume work) exploring three different parts of American society. The first, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), tells the story of the daughter of a migrant worker who marries a wealthy farmer in order to provide for her illegitimate (having unmarried parents) son. The woman's existence is destroyed when the boy murders his stepfather and kills himself. In Expensive People (1967), Oates exposes the world of people in the suburbs whose focus on material comforts reveals the emptiness of their lives. The final volume, them (1969), which won the National Book Award for fiction, describes the violence and suffering endured by three generations of an urban (city-dwelling) family in Detroit, Michigan. Oates's experiences as a teacher in Detroit during the early 1960s contributed to her knowledge of the city and its social problems.

Oates's novels of the 1970s explore characters involved with various American professional and cultural institutions while adding tragic elements. Wonderland (1971) is about a brilliant doctor who is unable to build a satisfying home life. Do With Me What You Will (1973) focuses on a young attorney who is honored by his peers for his devotion to social work. The Assassins: A Book of Hours (1975) deals with the effects of the murder of a politician on his wife and two brothers. Son of the Morning (1978) documents the rise and fall of a preacher whose faith is challenged and made stronger by various events in his life. Unholy Loves (1979) revolves around the lives of several teachers at a small New York college.

During the early 1980s Oates published several novels based on works by nineteenth-century authors. A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) is the story of five maiden sisters living in Pennsylvania in the late 1800s and is influenced by the writings of Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) and Emily Brontë (1818–1848). In Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), Oates borrowed heavily from the works of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). While some critics dismissed these works, others, citing Oates's accomplished description of evil, maintained that they are significant achievements in literature.

Other works and other names

Throughout Oates's writing career she has distributed her energies among several projects at once. Her book-length essay On Boxing (1987) led to at least one appearance commenting on a televised boxing match. Around the same time, she submitted a mystery novel to a publisher under a pseudonym (fake writing name) and had the thrill of having it accepted. Oates published the novel Lives of the Twins (1987) under the name Rosamond Smith. "I wanted a fresh reading; I wanted to escape from my own identity," Oates told Linda Wolfe in the New York Times Book Review. Though she used the name again for several other books, she resumed using her name with the publication of My Heart Laid Bare, in which she explores morality (the question of right and wrong) during the 1920s.

Oates's works in other forms also address darker sides of the human condition. Most critics feel that Oates's short fiction, for which she has twice received the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, best expresses her main themes. Such collections as By the North Gate; Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America (1974); The Lamb of Abyssalia (1980); and Raven's Wing (1986) contain pieces that focus on violent and abusive relationships between men and women.

Later works

In Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990), Oates returns to the familiar themes of race and violence. Other works from this time include Black Water (1992), an account of a tragic encounter between a powerful U.S. senator and a young woman he meets at a party, and Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), which describes the destructive activities of a group of teenage girls in the 1950s. The story is pieced together from former Foxfire gang member Maddy Wirtz's memories and journal and takes place in the industrial New York town of Hammond. Oates also had several plays published and produced in the 1990s.

In 1999 Oates's twenty-ninth novel, Broke Heart Blues, was published. In March 2000 Blonde, based on the life of actress Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), was released. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. In June 2000 Getting to Know You, a film based on Oates's 1992 short story collection Heat, was released. Oates edited the collection The Best American Essays of the Century, which was published in 2000. Middle Age: A Romance, a novel, and Beasts, a novella (a work whose length is greater than that of a short story but less than that of a novel), were published in 2001.

For More Information

Bender, Eileen. Joyce Carol Oates. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998.

Oates, Joyce Carol (1938– ),born in Lockport, N.Y., after graduation from Syracuse University and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin became a professor of English, first at the University of Detroit, then the University of Windsor, Ontario, and since 1987 at Princeton, and a prolific author. Her novels include With Shuddering Fall (1964); A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967); Expensive People (1968); them (1969, National Book Award); Wonderland (1971); Do with Me What You Will (1973); The Assassins (1975); The Childwold (1976); The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1978); Bellefleur (1980); A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982); Last Days (1984); Solstice (1985); Marya, a Life (1986); You Must Remember This (1987); Raven's Wing (1987); American Appetites (1989); Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); I Lock the Door Upon Myself (1990); Black Water (1992), a novella about a young woman who drowns in a car driven off a bridge by a U.S. senator; Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), which features an outlaw band of female warriors in a grim upstate New York city, and their fierce loyalty to their leader and founder; What I Lived for (1994); We Were the Mulvaneys (1996); Blonde (2001); I'll Take You There (2002); and Rape: A Love Story (2003); among others. Her fiction is peopled with realistically presented but often demonic persons whose attempts to express their own characters are frustrated by the grotesque and virulent culture of the U.S. (often symbolized by Detroit) and thus lead them into convulsive violence. The savage psychological portrayals of these people caught up in their passions and also victims of forces beyond their control or comprehension are presented as those of dwellers in a dark and destructive society. Her short stories have been collected in numerous volumes, including By the North Gate (1963), Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966), The Wheel of Love (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), The Hungry Ghosts (1974), The Goddess and Other Women (1974), Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1974), The Poisoned Kiss (1975), The Seduction (1975), Crossing the Border (1976), Night‐Side (1977), and Where Is Here? Stories (1992), Haunted, Tales of the Grotesque (1994), and I Am No One You Know (2004). She has also written poetry, collected in Women in Love (1968), Anonymous Sins (1969), Love and Its Derangements (1970), Angel Fire (1973), Dreaming America (1973), Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978), Invisible Women: New and Selected Poems 1970–1982 (1982), and The Time Traveler: Poems 1983–1989 (1990). Her essays and critical writings are gathered in The Edge of Impossibility (1971), The Hostile Sun (1973), New Heaven, New Earth (1974), Contraries (1981), The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1982), On Boxing (1987), and (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988).

Joyce Carol Oates 1938–, American author, b. Lockport, N.Y., grad. B.A., Syracuse Univ., 1960, M.A., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1961. She taught English at the Univ. of Detroit and the Univ. of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and has been affiliated with Princeton since 1978. Oates writes about contemporary American life, which she sees as often defined by violence. She is particularly concerned with the connection between violence and love. Her characters are mainly ordinary, inarticulate people who sublimate the terrible things that happen to them. Although some of her novels have been labeled gothic, the violence in them is neither mysterious nor necessarily dramatic; it occurs randomly as in everyday life.

Extraordinarily prolific, Oates has published more than 100 books in a variety of genres, among them dozens of novels. These include With Shuddering Fall (1964); a trilogy: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967, rev. ed. 2003), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969); Wonderland (1971); Childwold (1976); Cybele (1979); Bellefleur (1980); Solstice (1985); Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); What I Lived For (1994); My Heart Laid Bare (1998); Blonde (2000), a fictional work based on the life of Marilyn Monroe ; and My Sister, My Love (2008), a fictionalized treatment of the 1996 JonBenet Ramsey murder case. Oates's numerous short stories are collected in such volumes as Wheel of Love (1970), A Sentimental Education (1981), Heat (1991), Will You Always Love Me? (1996), Faithless (2001), Wild Nights! (2008), and Sourland (2010). Oates also has written thrillers under the name Rosamond Smith, plus poems, plays, children's fiction, essays, literary criticism, and a book on boxing (1988). After the sudden death of her husband in 2008, she wrote A Widow's Story (2011), a chronicle of grief and mourning.

Bibliography: See G. Johnson, ed., The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 (2007); L. Milazzo, ed., Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates (1989); biography by G. Johnson (1998); studies by L. W. Wagner, ed. (1979), E. G. Friedman (1980), T. Norman (1984), H. Bloom, ed. (1987), J. V. Creighton (1992), M. C. Wesley (1993), G. Johnson (1987 and 1994), B. Daly (1996), and G. Cologne-Brookes (2005).

Oates, Joyce Carol (1938– ), American novelist, short- story writer, poet, and critic, born in Lockport, New York, educated at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin. A former professor of English at the University of Detroit, where much of her work is set. She is a prolific novelist and short- story writer, whose fiction portrays intense individual experiences as expressions of the dark and violent heart of American society. Her novels, predominantly naturalistic but with suggestions of the neo-Gothic, include A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), The Assassins (1975), Bellefleur (1980), American Appetites (1989), and What I Lived For (1994). Black Water (1992), set on an island off the coast of Maine, is the story of a young woman's meeting with a US senator at a beach party and her subsequent death by drowning. Foxfire (1993) is a powerful portrayal of a teenage girl-gang in upstate New York during the 1950s. Among many short- story collections are Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966), The Hungry Ghosts (1974), The Poisoned Kiss (1975), and Last Days (1984). She has also published collections of poetry, collections of essays, and critical writings.

Oates, Joyce Carol (1938– ) US novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Oates' debut book of short stories was By the North Gate (1963). Her works, such as the trilogy A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968) and Them (1969), are grim chronicles of violence and deprivation in modern America. Other novels include The Assassins (1975), You Must Remember This (1987), and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996).