OATES, Joyce Carol

Born 16 June 1938, Millersport, New York

Also writes under: Rosamond Smith

Daughter of Frederic James and Carolina Bush Oates; married Raymond Joseph Smith, 1961

Joyce Carol Oates was raised on her grandparents' farm in rural upstate New York. She later wrote that her parents' working-class backgrounds contributed to the "harsh and unsentimental world" of her childhood, where life was a "continual daily scramble for existence." Oates' childhood community was the basis for Eden County, the setting of many of her works. Despite their tenuous existence, Oates' parents encouraged their eldest daughter's creative development and she began to form narratives even before she could write.

After completing her elementary education in a one-room schoolhouse, Oates attended large junior and senior high schools. Upon graduation from Williamsville Central High School in 1956, she entered Syracuse University on a scholarship. She majored in English and minored in philosophy while continuing to write, and published several pieces in the campus literary magazine during her years at Syracuse. In 1959 Oates was named cowinner of a college fiction award sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine for her short story "In the Old World." She graduated first in her class the following year after having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Oates entered the University of Wisconsin in Madison in September 1960 and graduated in June of the following year with an M.A. in English. While there she met and married Raymond Joseph Smith, a fellow graduate student. The couple moved to Beaumont, Texas, where Smith taught while Oates entered the doctoral program in English at Rice University in nearby Houston. She withdrew from Rice to devote herself to her writing, however, after one of her short stories was included in the annual Best American Short Stories. Oates' short stories, which have won four O. Henry awards and numerous other prizes, have always been very well received and are believed by many critics to be her finest works.

Oates' first book, a collection of short stories titled By the North Gate, was published in 1963 to highly favorable reviews. Like her subsequent short story collections, the stories in By the North Gate were carefully selected for their unifying theme. The title story, for example, concerns the devastating effect that the murder of his dog has on an old man. The remaining stories also deal with the line between civilization and brutality.

Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964 and deals with a naive young woman's stormy relationship with a race car driver. Although the novel received mixed reviews, Oates' second collection of short stories, Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966) was published to wide acclaim. Oates' skill as a writer continued to evolve with her next three novels, a trilogy exploring humanity's desire to live free of economic and social constraints. The third book in the trilogy, Them (1969), follows a fictional working-class family in Detroit over four decades and won Oates the National Book Award, thereby establishing her reputation as an important writer. Many of Oates' works, including Them, center on her characters' use of violence as a tool in their quest for physical or emotional freedom.

Them was only one of Oates' novels set in Detroit, where she and her husband lived from 1962 to 1967 while she taught English at the University of Detroit. Oates' first play, The Sweet Enemy (1965), was produced off Broadway while the couple lived in Detroit. Later plays were either published in book form or produced in a variety of cities, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New Haven, Connecticut.

After leaving Detroit, Oates and her husband moved to Ontario, Canada, where she became a professor of English at the University of Windsor. While there, Oates and her husband founded the Ontario Review, a book review journal of which the couple are still editors. Oates remained at the University of Windsor for over a decade before accepting a position as professor and writer-in-residence at Princeton University in 1978. She was still at Princeton in the late 1990s as the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of English.

In addition to novels and short stories, Oates has also published quite a few volumes of verse. Her first book of poetry, Anonymous Sins, was published in 1969 and comprised both new poems and those already published in journals like Atlantic Monthly. This and subsequent volumes of poetry received mixed reviews, and it is generally thought that Oates' gifts lie more in drama than in verse. Her novels of the 1970s explore the struggles and triumphs of practitioners of professions as diverse as law, medicine, politics, and academia.

Her short stories of this period, collections of which were published approximately every 18 months, contain equally vivid psychological portrayals. One of her most famous and frequently anthologized, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," was first published in 1966 and is considered a masterpiece of the short story form. The protagonist is Connie, a fifteen-year-old whose involvement with a mysterious older man reveals the dangers hiding just beneath the surface of ordinary life. Many of Oates' short stories and novels have similar characters who unwittingly slip from the mundane into a nightmarish reality lurking just out of sight. Oates herself pays homage to oldfashioned gothics, in which the terror is always hiding on the next page or in the next chapter, with several blatantly gothic novels like Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984).

Oates switched gears in the late 1980s with Marya: A Life (1986) and You Must Remember This (1987). These books are both autobiographical coming-of-age novels set in upstate New York and representing, according to Oates, her rural and urban experiences. One of Oates' most famous works, Because It is Bitter, and Because It is My Heart (1990), is also set in small-town New York and tells of the friendship between Jinx, a black teenager, and Iris, a younger white girl, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jinx accidentally kills a boy who was harassing Iris and the two characters find that it is not as easy to escape their shared guilt and fear as it is to escape their hometown.

Oates wrote several novels in the late 1980s and early 1990s utilizing the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, a feminization of her husband's name, including: Lives of the Twins (1988), Soul/Mate (1989), Nemesis (1990), Snake Eyes (1992), and You Can't Catch Me (1995). Although Oates reportedly claimed to be finished with her pseudonym after completing You Can't Catch Me, she returned to it for Double Delight (1997) and Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon (1999).

In Black Water (1993), which she wrote under her own name, Oates borrows a page from history to tell a Chappaquiddickesque tale of a young woman left to drown by a senator more frightened for his career than of his conscience. Oates was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for this haunting book, which is regarded as one of her finest. In 1994 Oates earned a very different honor when she received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement award for horror fiction.

Oates revisited several formats for the first time in almost a decade in the late 1990s. George Bellows: American Artist (1995) was her first new nonfiction title in several years, while Tenderness (1996) was a new collection of poetry, and Come Meet the Muffin! (1998) was a new children's book. She also continued in her role as editor and compiler of other writers' works with titles like The Essential Dickinson (1996), Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers (1998), and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, 2nd edition (1998).

An award-winning and highly distinguished writer, Oates has published short story collections, novels, volumes of verse, nonfiction on a variety of topics, plays, and innumerable pieces in popular magazines and literary journals. The diversity displayed by her choice of format is matched only by the topics and characters in her considerable body of work. Her nonfiction works, for example, are on subjects as diverse as boxing, cats, and the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, while her fiction ranges from realistic, autobiographical portraits of everyday life to tales of gothic romance to stories of shocking physical and emotional violence. As Oates herself has said, "I have a laughably Balzacian ambition to get the whole world into a book."