Joyce Carol Oates
Author, essayist, educator
Born: June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York
Lives in: Princeton, New Jersey
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2012: Arts & Entertainment
An incredibly prolific author, Joyce Carol Oates is notable not just for the consistent excellence of her writing, but also for the variety of her work, which ranges from children’s fiction to horror stories.
The daughter of a tool-and-die designer and a homemaker, Oates grew up on in a working-class farming community in upstate New York. She began her education in the same one-room schoolhouse that her mother attended and proceeded to become her family’s first high-school graduate. Oates earned a scholarship to Syracuse University, where she studied English and graduated valedictorian in 1960. She next received an M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Oates began writing at age 14 when her paternal grandmother gifted her with a typewriter. During college, she tried her hand at novels. She threw away those early efforts, but in 1964, Vanguard Press published her first official novel, “With Shuddering Fall.” Two years later, Oates wrote “Where Are you Going, Where Have You Been?”–a short story inspired by a Bob Dylan song. It became one of her best-known works.
Oates’ second novel, “A Garden of Earthly Delights,” was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1967. She received four more National Book Award nominations, winning for her 1969 novel, “them.” Spanning several decades in the mid-20th century, “them” graphically depicts the struggles of a working-class family in Detroit.
Like much of Oates’ work, “them” was based on real people Oates knew or real-world situations with which she was familiar. Themes in her work, including suicide and violence, can be traced back to tragic incidents that marred her childhood. Oher frequent themes include rural poverty, sexual abuse, and class tensions.
Among Oates’ more than 50 novels, other notable titles include “Black Water” (1992), “What I Lived For” (1994), and “Blonde” (2000), each of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Two of her collections of short stories—“The Wheel of Love” (1970) and “Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories” (2014)—also were Pulitzer Prize finalists. Oates other honors include two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize.
From 1978-2014, Oates taught at Princeton University, where she was one of the school’s most visible instructors, leading four creative-writing workshops each year. She also has taught at the University of California-Berkeley and Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
Despite her remarkable output, Oates disputes the notion that she is a workaholic. In her Princeton bio, she states: “Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don’t think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.”