Oates, Joyce Carol
The Oxford Companion to American Literature
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1995
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| © The Oxford Companion to American Literature 1995, originally published by Oxford University Press 1995. (Hide copyright information)
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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).
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