Joyce Carol Oates | |
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Oates in 2014 | |
| Born | June 16, 1938 Lockport, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | |
| Education | Syracuse University (BA) University of Wisconsin, Madison (MA) Rice University |
| Period | 1963–present |
| Notable awards | O. Henry Award (1967) National Book Award (1970) O. Henry Award (1973) National Humanities Medal (2010) Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement (2012) Jerusalem Prize (2019) |
| Spouses |
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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 non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and 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,[1] for her novel them (1969), 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.[2] Since 2016, she has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction in the spring semesters.[3]
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.[4]
Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent,[5][6] and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer.[5] 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[5] and institutionalized, and Oates has not seen her since 1971.[7]) Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York,[8] and characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status",[5] but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence".[9] Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce.[8] 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).[8]
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; and Oates's paternal grandmother survived, at age fourteen, an attempted murder-suicide at the hands of her own father.[10] As a child, Oates’s next-door neighbor pled guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica Correctional Facility.[11]
Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child.[5] 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!"[12] 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".[13]
Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter.[8] Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools[5] and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper.[14] She was the first in her family to complete high school.[5]
As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[15]
Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined Phi Mu. 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".[16] 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".[13] 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[17] and graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960,[18] 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.[19]
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.[20]
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".[21] The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson".[22] 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?"[23]
Another early short story, "In a Region of Ice" (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1966[24]), 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: Stories (1984). "In the Region of Ice" won the first of her two O. Henry Awards.[24]
Her 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.[1] 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'.[25] 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?"[26]
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".[27] 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.[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.[9]
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.[23] 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.[28]
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.[29] 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".[30]
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".[31]
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.[32]
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.[33]
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.[8] Smith served as editor of this venture, and Oates served as associate editor.[34] 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."[35] In 1978, Sylvester & Orphanos published Sentimental Education.[36]
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 ...".[5]
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.[5] 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.[37] Foer recalled later that Oates took an interest in his writing and his "most important of writerly qualities, energy,"[38] 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."[38] 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).[37]
Oates retired from teaching at Princeton in 2014 and was honored at a retirement party in November of that year.[39][40]
Oates has taught creative short fiction at UC Berkeley since 2016 and offers her course in spring semesters.[41]
Oates was raised Catholic, but as of 2007 she identified as an atheist.[42] 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."[43]
Oates self-identifies as a liberal, and supports gun control.[44] She was a vocal critic of former US President Donald Trump and his policies, both in public and on Twitter.[45]
Oates opposed the shuttering of cultural institutions on Trump's inauguration day as a protest against the President, stating this "would only hurt artists. Rather, cultural institutions should be sanctuaries for those repelled by the inauguration."[46]
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."[47]
Oates is a regular poster on Twitter with her account given to her by her publisher HarperCollins.[48] She has drawn particular criticism for the purportedly perceived Islamophobia of her tweets. Oates stated in her criticized tweet, "Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic – Egypt – natural to inquire: what's the predominant religion?" She later backtracked from that statement.[49][50] Oates was also criticized for responding to a Mississippi school's pulling of To Kill a Mockingbird from its eighth grade curriculum with a tweet claiming that Mississippians do not read.[51]
Oates defended her statements on Twitter saying, "I don't consider that I really said anything that I don't feel and I think that sometimes the crowd is not necessarily correct. You know, Kierkegaard said, 'The crowd is a lie.' The sort of lynch mob mentality among some people on Twitter and they rush after somebody – they rush in this direction; they rush over here; they're kind of rushing around the landscape of the news".[44]
Oates writes in longhand,[52] working from "8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening."[29] Her prolificacy has become one of her best-known attributes, although often discussed disparagingly.[29] The New York Times wrote in 1989 that Oates's "name is synonymous with productivity",[53] and in 2004, The Guardian noted that "Nearly every review of an Oates book, it seems, begins with a list [of her publication totals]".[5]
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 […] ".[54] 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?"[29]
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).[55] In 2006, The Times listed them, On Boxing (in collaboration with photographer John Ranard) (1987), Black Water, and High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006) as "The Pick of Joyce Carol Oates".[56] In 2007, Entertainment Weekly listed its Oates favorites as Wonderland, Black Water, Blonde, I'll Take You There (2002), and The Falls (2004).[57] 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."[58]
