Oates, Joyce Carol

June 16, 1938 -

Place of Birth:  Lockport, NY

Place of Principle Residence:  Princeton, NJ

Biography:
  Joyce Carol Oates was born to Caroline and Frederic (tools and dye designer) Oates at Lockport, New York in 1938.  She led a working-class, rough-and-tumble childhood that she has affectionately recalled in much of her fiction.  Before learning to write, Oates told stories by drawing and painting.  When she received her typewriter at fourteen, Oates began to train herself to write novels.  She attended Syracuse University on a scholarship, during of which she won the much-desired Mademoiselle fiction contest.  In 1960 she got her B.A., and received her M.A. at the University of Wisconsin in 1961.  Oates met her husband, Raymond Smith, at Wisconsin University and the two moved to Detroit, where Oates worked at the University of Detroit, first as an instructor, then as an assistant professor.  In 1967 Oates moved to University of Windsor, where she taught English for eleven years.  During this period she wrote books at an amazing speed, averaging two to three a year.  According to Oates, this efficiency was a product of her daily routine and not viewing writing as work.  In 1978, Oates and her husband moved to Princeton University, where she works today as a writer in residence and a Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.  She and her husband have published a literary magazine, the Ontario Review.  Soon after coming to Princeton Oates began working on the first of her gothic novels, Bellefleur.  While still in her thirties, Oates became a well-known and respected writer.

Selected Works:

         
• By the North Gate (1963)
         
• Expensive People (1967)
         
• The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970)
         
• Crossing the Border: Fifteen Tales (1976)
         
• A Bloodsmore Romance (1983)
         
• The Assignation (1988)
         
• We were the Mulvaneys (1996)
         
• Naughty Cherie (2008)

Awards:

         
• 1966, 1968 National Endowment for the Arts grants
         
• 1967, 1973 Guggenheim fellowship
         
• 1967, 1973 O. Henry Award, Doubleday
         
• 1968 Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters
         
• 1968, 1969 National Book Award nomination
         
• 1970, 1986 National Book Award
         
• 1975 Lotos Club Award of Merit
         
• 1979 American Library Association Notable Book
         
• 1980 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
         
• 1988 Literary Michigan by the Michigan Council for the Humanities
         
• 1988 St. Louis Literary Award

Critical Reception:

For The Gravedigger’s Daughter:

“This is neither a depressing story nor an uplifting one. Oates succeeds here, as she often does, in making such judgments feel simple-minded. What it all seems is true and therefore moving and somewhat terrible, but in an exhilarating way. Every aspect of the ungainly plot feels right, including its ungainliness. Resolutions fail to arrive; lost people fail to return. Flowing through and past it all, surfacing for these 600 pages, is Oates’s turbulent, cross-currented prose, with its hot upwellings and icy eddies. It’s the opposite of lapidary, and has the disadvantage of being impossible to quote effectively in a brief review, but for the enthralled reader, Oates’s water will eventually have its proverbial way with other writers’ stone.”             -  The Washington Post

“Joyce Carol Oates’s 36th novel proves that more is, sometimes, more. The Seattle Times calls it an “opus,” while The Oregonian describes it as her “masterpiece.” In a return to upstate New York, the novel, based in part on the life of Oates’s paternal grandmother, carries exceptional emotional heft. While striking Oates’s trademark dark, suspenseful notes at the start, it turns to themes of reinvention and hope as Rebecca journeys through life. The epilogue, when an elderly Rebecca pens letters to a cousin who survived the Holocaust, resounds deeply. A few reviewers cited poor writing, confusing narrative switches, and flat secondary characters, but overall, Gravedigger’s Daughter may be one of Oates’s best novels in years.”             - Bookmarks Magazine

For Blonde: A Novel:

“In the perverse manner all too typical of her singular career, Oates follows up one of her best novelslast year’s plaintive Broke Heart Blueswith one of the worst she (or any other contemporary ``serious’’ author, for that matter) has ever committed to paper. It’s a bloated, humorless fictional speculation on the life and career of Marilyn Monroe that mixes together canned US and film history, fanzine gossip, and heavy-breathing fantasy.”               - Kirkus Reviews

“Oates, for whom writing seems to be as involuntary and constant as breathing, liberates the real woman behind the mythological creature called Marilyn Monroe. In most hands, a fictional retelling of Monroe’s tragic life seems utterly unnecessary, but Oates—long an avid observer of the rise and fall of celebrities and the public’s morbid lust for vicarious violence—transforms a redundant exercise into an act of redemption.”             - Booklist

 

Relevance of Place to Author’s Work:
    Oates attributes Detroit to shaping the person and writer she is today.  In the Michigan Quarterly Review, she commented, “If we [Oates and her husband] had never come to the city of Detroit I would have been a writer (indeed, I had already written my first two books before coming here, aged twenty-three) but Detroit, my ‘great’ subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am-for better or worse.”

 

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