Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer.

Oates wrote her first book in 1963, as well as a number of novels and novellas, as well as a number of books and novellas, as well as a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction.

She has received many accolades for her writing, including the National Book Award for her novella (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).

Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) and short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Oates worked at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and he is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.

She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction.

Early life and education

Oates was born in Lockport, New York, as the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She grew up on her parents' farm outside of the town.

Fred Jr. and Lynn Ann, her older brother, were born in 1943 and 1956, respectively. (Lynn Ann is both autistic and institutionalized, and Oates hasn't seen her since 1971.) Oates grew up in Millersport, New York, and described her family as "a joy, close-knit, and unextraordinary family for our time, place, and economic status," but she described her childhood as "a continuing struggle for existence." Blanche Woodside, her paternal grandmother, grew up with the family and was "very close" to Joyce. Joyce learned that Blanche's father had murdered himself and Blanche had later denied her Jewish roots; Oates later reflected on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the book The Gravedigger's Daughter (2006).

Oates and her new ancestors were marred by violence in 1917, which resulted in Oates mother's adoption; and Oates' paternal grandmother survived, with a suicide attempt carried out by her own father at age 14. Oates' next-door neighbor pled guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica's Correctional Facility.

This was love at first sight!"

When Blanche gave her a typewriter, Oates began writing at the age of 14. Oates enrolled in multiple larger, suburban schools and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper. She was the first in her family to complete high school.

Oates received early praise for her writing when she was crowned a Scholastic Art and Writing Award as a teen.

Personal life

In 1961, Oates married Raymond J. Smith, a fellow graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and they married. Smith began as an 18th-century scholar and, later, an editor and publisher. "A match of like minds" and "a highly collaborative and creative marriage," Oates characterized the relationship as "a collaborative and creative union."

Smith died of pneumonia complications on February 18, 2008, and the death of Oates devastated Oates greatly. "Since my husband's unexpected death, I actually have very little energy." Oates wrote to an interviewer in April 2008. The future of my writing isn't particularly concerned for me at the moment, even though it involves his death."

At a dinner party at her house, Oates met Charles Gross, a researcher in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, after six months of near-suicidal grief for Smith. Oates and Gross were married in early 2009, just as a child. Gross had died at the age of 83 on April 13, 2019, according to Oates, who revealed it on Twitter.

Oates began keeping a detailed journal in 1973, chronicling her personal and literary life; eventually, it grew to "more than 4,000 single-spaced typewritten pages." In 2008, Oates said she had "gone away from keeping a formal journal" and instead saved copies of her e-mails.

Oates remained committed to running as of 1999, as she wrote, "Ideally, the writer who is a writer would be running through the land- and cityscapes of her story like a ghost in a real setting." While running, Oates mentally imagines scenes in her books and sketches out structural issues in already-written drafts; she created the nexus of her book You Must Remember This (1987) when running, which reminded her of "a mystic upstate New York city in the right location."

From 1997 to 2016, Oates served on the board of trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is an honorary member of the Simpson Literary Project, which annually awards the $50,000 Simpson/Joyce Oates Literary Award to a mid-career writer. She has served as the Project's artist-in-residence several times.

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Career

When she was 26 years old, Oates' first book, With Shuddering Falls (1964), was published by Vanguard Press. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" she wrote in 1966. "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and published after listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." The story is loosely based on serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson." It has been anthologized several times and adapted as a 1985 film, Smooth Talk, starring Laura Dern. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," Oates said of all her published work in 2008.

"In a Region of Ice" (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1966), a young, talented Jewish-American student in a short story. It dramatizes his aspiration into rebellion against education and the sober, established society of his parents, his sadness, and ultimately murder-cum-suicide. It was influenced by a true-life event (as many of her creations) and Oates had been familiar with her protagonist's style. In the title story of her collection Last Days: Stories (1984), she revisited the subject. The first of her two O. Henry Awards, "In the Region of Ice," was named in the first of her two O. Henry Awards.

A Garden of Eden (1967), the first of the so-called Wonderland Quartet, was published by Vanguard 1967-71. All of them were candidates for the annual National Book Award. The third book in the series, "They (1969), received the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970. It's been set in Detroit from the 1930s to the 1960s, the majority of which in black ghetto areas, and it deals directly with crime, opioids, and racial and class tensions. Again, several of the key characters and events were based on true people who Oates had no idea or heard about during her time in the city. Since then, she has published an average of two books a year. Rural poverty, sexual abuse, misogyny, a desire for autonomy, feminine childhood, and adolescence are all typical topics in her work, with occasional 'fantastic' appearing. Violence is a regular in her writing, even prompting Oates to write an essay in reaction to the query, "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?"

She wrote "the feeling of writing [it]]" in 1990 as "too intense it seemed almost electric" in her book "Why It Is Bitter" and "Is My Heart, which also addresses issues of racial tension. She is a fan of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, who has often compared Plath's suicide to Plath, but Oates disapproves Plath's romanticism, and among her characters, she favors cunning, hardy survivors, both women and men. Oates began writing stories in the Gothic and horror genres in the early 1980s; during her foray into these genres, Oates said she was "deeply inspired" by Kafka and felt "a writerly kinship" with James Joyce.

Following the disintegration of an American family's home, Oates published We Were the Mulvaneys in 1996, a novel that became a best-seller after being selected by Oprah's Book Club in 2001. We Were the Mulvaneys was eventually turned into a television show that was nominated for several awards. Oates wrote several books in the 1990s and early 2000s, most suspense novels under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Since at least the early 1980s, Oates has been considered a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature by oddsmakers and critics alike. 17 unpublished short stories and four unpublished or unfinished novellas were among her papers, which were held at Syracuse University. According to Oates, the majority of her early unpublished work was "cheerfully thrown away."

According to one of Oates' 1970 story collection The Wheel of Love described her as a writer "with a lot of talent" but "far from being a good writer."

The death of John A. Fiocco Jr., a 19-year-old New Jersey college student, was discussed in Oates' 2006 short story "Landfill" because it focused on the death of the young man.

In 1998, Oates was named recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, which is given each year to celebrate excellence in American literature.

In 1974, Oates founded The Ontario Review, a literary journal in Canada, with Raymond J. Smith, her husband and fellow graduate student who would later become a professor of 18th-century literature. Smith was the editor of this magazine, and Oates was associate editor. According to Smith, the editor, the magazine's aim was to bridge the literary and artistic traditions of the United States and Canada: "We attempted to do this by releasing writers and artists from both countries, as well as essays and studies of an intercultural nature." Sylvester & Orphanos, 1978, published Sentimental Education.

Oates and Smith founded Ontario Review Books, an independent publishing house, in 1980. Both my husband and I are keen on literature and we read the same books; we'll be reading a book and then reading it; and we'll talk about our reading at meal times.

Oates worked in Beaumont, Texas, for a year and then moved to Detroit, where she began teaching at the University of Detroit. Influenced by the Vietnam war, the 1967 Detroit race riots, and a job opening, Oates and her husband followed the river into Canada in 1968 and Ontario, where she and her husband have moved across the river to a teaching position. She moved to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1978, where she began teaching at Princeton University.

Jonathan Safran Foer, who took an intro writing course with Oates in 1995 as a Princeton undergraduate, was influenced by Oates, among other things. Later, Foer recalled that Oates was more interested in his writing and his "most significant of writerly traits, enthusiasm," noting that she was "the first person to ever make me believe in any sort of serious way. "It's changed my life after that." Oates was advisor on Foer's senior thesis, which was a early copy of his book Everything Is Illuminated (which was released in 2002).

In 2014, Oates retired from teaching at Princeton and was honoured at a retirement party in November of that year.

Since 2016, Oates has taught creative short fiction at UC Berkeley and currently offers her course in spring semesters.

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