Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates

Oates in 2006.
Born 16 June 1938 (1938-06-16) (age 69)
Lockport, New York
Occupation Novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, literary critic, professor, editor
Nationality American
Writing period 1963-
Influences
Influenced

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 were edited by her late 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 fourteen years old. 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 nineteen years old. After graduating as valedictorian from Syracuse in 1960 (where she was a member of Phi Mu), Oates received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1961.

She is a member of Mensa.[2]

[edit] Career

Oates taught at the University of Detroit, publishing her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, when she was twenty-six years old. Her novel them received the National Book Award in 1970. She then started teaching at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, right across the river from Detroit in 1968 to 1978. Since then she has published an average of two books a year, many of them novels. 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?" 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. She gained much attention for her book-length essay On Boxing. 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?",[3] (1966), was dedicated to Bob Dylan.[4] Oates said she wrote the story after listening to Dylan's song, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue".[5] The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson".[6] It was the basis for the film, Smooth Talk, starring Laura Dern.

Oates is a member of the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is frequently cited as a perennial "favorite" to win the Nobel Prize in Literature by oddsmakers and critics.[7]

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."[8]

Oates' husband of forty-five years, Raymond J. Smith, died in February 2008.

[edit] Style and themes

From her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964, up to Kindred Passions in 1987, 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 Eden County, an imaginary area of upstate New York; in academia; in the Detroit slums and 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

In 2001, Oates stated that it was hard to begin tracing her literary influences, because "[t]here are so many."[9] However, she has named several influences for her writing, both the content and her style. In her essay collection The Faith of a Writer, Oates wrote that a gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when she was eight was "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!"[10] She has also cited the influence of Sylvia Plath, Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, Flannery O'Connor, Bob Dylan, and William Faulkner.[citation needed] In her forays into gothic and horror fiction, Oates said she was "deeply influenced" by Franz Kafka and feels "a writerly kinship" with James Joyce.[9]

[edit] Select awards and honors

Winner:

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

  • The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)
  • I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1990)
  • The Rise of Life on Earth (1991)
  • Black Water (1992)
  • First Love: A Gothic Tale (1996)
  • Beasts (2002)
  • Rape: A Love Story (2003)
  • The Corn Maiden : A Love Story (2005)

[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)
    • How I Contemplated The World From The Detroit House Of Correction
  • 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)
  • Wild Nights! (2008)

[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

  • Women In Love and Other Poems (1968)
  • 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)
  • The Coming Storm (Forthcoming)

[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 hard-working."
  • "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."
  • "The brain is a muscle" from Love and Its Derangements (1970)
  • "Revenge is living well, without you."

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Program in Creative Writing, Princeton University
  2. ^ Folse, Molly. "The Mensans and Me: Intelligence and perception put to the test at American Mensa's Annual Gathering." Birmingham Weekly October 25-November 1, 2007. [1]
  3. ^ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is available online here
  4. ^ Dedication Of Joyce Carol Oates Short Story To Dylan.
  5. ^ Lyrics to It's All Over Now, Baby Blue are available online here.
  6. ^ Charles Schmid, The Pied Piper of Tucson. CourtTV Crime Library.
  7. ^ New York Times, October 12, 2006 
  8. ^ ""The Madness of Scholarship"", Kennesaw: The Magazine of Kennesaw State College, 1993. 
  9. ^ a b HorrorOnline Author Focus: Joyce Carol Oates 1999
  10. ^ Oates (2003.) The Faith of a Writer. p. 14.
  11. ^ http://www.chfestival.org/fest2006/index.cfm?fa=home.program&id=1236&sec=adult
  12. ^ Joyce Carol Oates' book, "We Were the Mulvaneys."
  13. ^ http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-national-book-critics-circle-award.html
  14. ^ http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-national-book-critics-circle-award.html
  15. ^ The National Book Foundation
  16. ^ http://www.penfaulkner.org/affWinners01.htm
  17. ^ http://jco.usfca.edu/awards.html
  18. ^ http://www.bookcritics.org/?go=pastAwards
  19. ^ http://www.nationalbook.org/nba1990.html
  20. ^ http://jco.usfca.edu/works/novels/wonderland.html
  21. ^ http://www.nationalbook.org/nba1969.html
  22. ^ http://www.nationalbook.org/nba1968.html

[edit] External links

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