Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates

Pseudonym: "Lauren Kelly"
"Rosamond Smith"
Born: 16 June 1938
Lockport, New York
Occupation: Novelist
Short story writer
Playwright
Poet
Literary critic
Professor
Editor
Nationality: United States
Writing period: 1963 -
Debut works: Novel:With Shuddering Fall (1964)
Short story:By the North Gate (1963)
Play:Miracle Play (1974)
Poetry:Anonymous Sins and Other Poems (1969)

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978 ([1]).

She serves as associate editor for the Ontario Review, a literary magazine, and the Ontario Review Press, a literary book publisher, both of which are edited by her husband, Raymond J. Smith.

Oates has also written under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly."

Contents

[edit] Background and education

Oates was born in Lockport, New York, and grew up in the New York countryside. She attended the same one-room school her mother attended as a child.

Oates often remarks about receiving a copy of Alice in Wonderland when she was a little girl, and how it affected her life very deeply, growing up on a farm with very few books.

Oates began to write stories with the typewriter she received from her grandmother when she was 14. She excelled in school, and she worked for her high school newspaper called WISP at Williamsville High School in Williamsville, New York (now called Williamsville South High School). Oates won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University. She also won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle when she was 19. After graduating as valedictorian from Syracuse in 1960, Oates received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1961.

[edit] Career

Oates taught at the University of Detroit, publishing her first novel, With Shuddering Fall. when she was 26. Her novel them received the National Book Award in 1970. Oates has also written several books, mostly mystery novels, under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. She also taught at the University of Windsor in Canada for ten years before moving to Princeton in 1978.

Her frequently anthologized short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" ([2]) (1966), was dedicated to Bob Dylan ([3]).

Oates wrote the story while listening to Dylan's song, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" ([4]). This story was also the basis for the film, Smooth Talk, starring Laura Dern. The story itself is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as ([5]) "The Pied Piper of Tucson". Oates' story was transformed into a song entitled "The Salesman, Denver Max" by The Blood Brothers and is featured on their album, ...Burn, Piano Island, Burn. The song "Rats and Rats and Rats for Candy" on this album was inspired by another of her stories.

Oates is a member of the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Oates is a fan of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, describing Plath's sole novel The Bell Jar as a "near perfect work of art."

She is also frequently cited as a perennial "favorite" to win the Nobel Prize in Literature by oddsmakers and critics [1].

Her papers, held at Syracuse University, includes 17 unpublished short stories and four unpublished or unfinished novellas. Oates has said that most of her early unpublished work was "Cheerfully thrown away."[2]

[edit] Style and themes

From her first novel, in 1964, With Shuddering Fall up to 1987, Kindred Passions, Oates built up a literary corpus that mixes Gothic estrangement with high social observation. Her works contain the typical elements of this type of tale: unconscious forces, seduction, incest, violence, and rape, sometimes to the point of sensationalism. She has written in a variety of genres, eras and landscapes -thus, she has works settled in a Faulkner-like region of Eden County, in academia, the Detroit slums, or the Pennsylvania backwoods. But her works are not mere renderings of unusual experiences in far away places, both in space and time: novels such as A Bloodsmoor Romance, The Mysteries of Wintherthurn and Kindred Passions contain strong feminist overtones and use of the Gothic device to explore the ambiguities of gender and the sexual bases of fantasy.

[edit] Influences

Oates has named several influences for her writing, both the content and her style. Among them are such people as Sylvia Plath, Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, Bob Dylan, and William Faulkner.

[edit] Select awards and honors

Winner:

  • 2006: Chicago Tribune Literary Prize [6]
  • 2005: Prix Femina Etranger - The Falls
  • 2001: Oprah's Book Club - We Were the Mulvaneys [7]
  • 1996: Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize - Zombie
  • 1996: Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a novel - Zombie
  • 1990: Heidemann Award for one-act plays - Tone Clusters, co-winner
  • 1970: National Book Award - them
  • 1968: Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters - A Garden of Earthly Delights
  • 1959: Mademoiselle college fiction award - In the Old World

Nominated:

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels


[edit] Novels as "Rosamond Smith"

  • Lives of the Twins (1987) (U.K. title: Kindred Passions)
  • Soul/Mate (1989)
  • Nemesis (1990)
  • Snake Eyes (1992)
  • You Can't Catch Me (1995)
  • Double Delight (1997)
  • Starr Bright Will Be With you Soon (1999)
  • The Barrens (2001)

[edit] Novels as "Lauren Kelly"

  • Take Me, Take Me With You (2003)
  • The Stolen Heart (2005)
  • Blood Mask (2006)

[edit] Novellas

[edit] Short story collections

  • By the North Gate (1963)
  • Upon the Sweeping Flood And Other Stories (1966)
  • The Wheel of Love And Other Stories (1970)
  • Marriages and Infidelities (1972)
  • The Goddess and Other Women (1974)
  • The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies (1974)
  • Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? : Stories of Young America (1974)
  • The Poisoned Kiss And Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975)
  • The Seduction & Other Stories (1975)
  • Crossing the Border: Fifteen Tales (1976)
  • Night-Side (1977)
  • All the Good People I've Left Behind (1979)
  • A Sentimental Education: Stories (1980)
  • Last Days: Stories (1984)
  • Wild Saturday (1984)
  • Raven's Wing: Stories (1986)
  • The Assignation: Stories (1989)
  • Oates In Exile (1990)
  • Heat And Other Stories (1991)
  • Where Is Here? (1992)
  • Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories (1993)
  • 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)

[edit] Drama

  • Miracle Play (1974)
  • Three Plays (1980)
  • In Darkest America (1991)
  • I Stand Before You Naked (1991)
  • Twelve Plays (1991) (including Black)
  • The Perfectionist and Other Plays (1995)
  • New Plays (1998)
  • Dr. Magic: Six One Act Plays (2004)

[edit] Essays and Criticism

  • The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972)
  • The Hostile Sun: The Poetry of D.H. Lawrence (1974)
  • New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)
  • Contraries: Essays (1981)
  • The Profane Art: Essays & Reviews (1983)
  • On Boxing (1987)
  • (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)
  • George Bellows: American Artist (1995)
  • Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (1999)
  • The Faith of A Writer: Life, Craft, Art (2003)
  • Uncensored: Views & (Re)views (2005)

[edit] Poetry

  • Anonymous Sins & Other Poems (1969)
  • Love and Its Derangements (1970)
  • Angel Fire (1973)
  • The Fabulous Beasts (1975)
  • Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978)
  • Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970-1982 (1982)
  • The Time Traveler (1989)
  • Tenderness (1996)

[edit] Young adult fiction

[edit] Children's fiction

  • Come Meet Muffin! (1998)
  • Where Is Little Reynard? (2003)

[edit] Quotes

  • "I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking."
  • "I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life."
  • "Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."

[edit] References

  1. ^ *New York Times, October 12, 2006: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Nobel-Literature.html.
  2. ^ ""The Madness of Scholarship"", Kennesaw: The Magazine of Kennesaw State College, 1993.

[edit] External links

Papers

Biographies:

Websites and reviews:

Interviews and Speeches:

Miscellaneous:

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