Joyce Carol Oates
BIO
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.
ARTICLE
I find this fact remarkable: Joyce Carol Oates is the author of only 29 novels. I feel like she has written at least one hundred, if not a thousand. Every time I pick up the book review section of any magazine or newspaper, I find a review about something she has written or edited...Joyce Carol Oates is everywhere you turn. She is, I think, the most prolific writer of the 20th century (unless you consider Anthony Burgess, who started on the express train to literary history in his early 40s, thinking he could eek out one volume before what was supposed to be an early death from a less than malignant tumor).
But I digress.
The great Oates was born in Lockport, New York, where she was raised a Catholic (That explains all the Sturm und Drang and redemption clauses in her books.) As an English major at Syracuse University, she wrote ONE NOVEL EACH TERM. (Have you ever heard anyone else ever make that claim?) In 1961, she earned an MFA at the University of Wisconsin and got married. She is permanently ensconced at Princeton University, where she is the only gourmet cook/professor in the graduate English department (check out the June issue of GOURMET for a trip inside one of her famous dinner parties.)
I love Joyce Carol Oates. I love her for being able to write three books a year. I love her for always, ALWAYS telling the reader exactly what it is like to be a woman, no matter where or when her story is set. Her work is characterized by often unbearable violence, and this violence emphasizes her characters' struggles to define themselves against their oppressive environments. Women often struggle against sexual oppression, against victimization, against stereotyping. When a woman finds her identity in marriage in the Oates world, she often also finds herself caught in an alienating parody of the American dream. Oates, the farm girl from upstate New York, has never forgotten about the demands of family, traditions of land and culture and religion, the things that shape us all and against which we fight in order to define and save our own lives.
Oates is also thoughtful, taking on our social myths with her generous and outlandish love of all things American. In BLACK WATER, she reconsiders Teddy Kennedy's unfortunate accident at Chappaquiddick. In ZOMBIE, she goes inside the mind of a serial killer (Oates wrote this novel long before its subject became fashionable). In ON BOXING, she looks at the bloodsport with awe and wonder and a fascination with "may the best man win." She examines men's fascination with young women (really young women) in her book, YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS. Her work is always timely (BELLEFLEUR and BLOODSMOOR ROMANCE, among others, set women's struggles in the guise of historical novels about ages gone by), and it teaches us about the darker side of American culture, without making us yearn for some lighter, cleaner era in which everything was swept under the rug in every happy American home.
She is, without a doubt, a truly American original with, perhaps, the most Puritan of work ethics (she still turns out at least three books each year). May she long find the time and energy to continue her remarkable work well into the next century. We will all certainly be reading every word she wishes to write for us.
--- Jana Siciliano
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