Joyce Carol Oates
| Joyce Carol Oates | |
|---|---|
Oates in 2014
|
|
| Born |
June 16, 1938 Lockport, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, literary critic, professor, editor |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1963–present |
| Notable awards | 1967 O. Henry Award 1973 O. Henry Award 1970 National Book Award 2010 National Humanities Medal 2012 Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement |
| Spouse |
Raymond J. Smith (1961–2008; his death) Charles Gross (2009–present) |
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), Blonde (2000), and short story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978 and is currently the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.
Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She is the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She was raised Catholic but is now an atheist. Her brother, Fred Jr., was born in 1943, and her sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely autistic, was born in 1956. Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York, and characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status" but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence." Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce. After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that Blanche's father had killed himself, and Blanche had subsequently concealed her Jewish heritage; Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007).
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