Scarce Joyce Carol Oates Signed Very Rare 8.5X11 Paper Son Of The Morning

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176269159338 SCARCE JOYCE CAROL OATES SIGNED VERY RARE 8.5X11 PAPER SON OF THE MORNING. TYPED MANUSCRIPT SIGNED, "JOYCE CAROL OATS." [N.P.: N.D.] ONE PAGE, QUARTO, TYPED ON PALE PINK PAPER, SIGNED IN BLUE INK. FROM HER POEM "SON OF THE MORNING." FINE Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s novel “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart” (1990), Jinx Fairchild, a star high-school athlete, is assigned a five-hundred-word paper on the topic “I Believe.” To his surprise, Jinx finds himself endlessly tweaking the essay—“in a ferocity of concentration,” Oates tells us, “as singleminded as his concentration on basketball.” The aim of this “exhausting” process is not to sharpen his syntax or to clarify his thinking but to present the truth as he perceives it and to demonstrate his newfound sense that “words on paper” can be “expressions of the soul.” It’s hardly a stretch to see an allegory here for his creator’s own methods—his approach to composing a credo emerging as a credo in itself. As far back as the novels in Oates’s Wonderland Quartet, such as “Expensive People” (1968) and “them” (1969), which received the National Book Award fifty years ago this fall, Oates has deployed her zeal for revision to forge a style of rousing roughness. Her dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them set in western New York, forgo an air of cool mastery in favor of a kind of cultivated vulnerability, an openness to engulfment. Human existence, in her handling, seems a primarily somatic enterprise, and her greedily adjectival prose can sometimes read like a sort of dramatized phenomenology. Even on a bustling city street, her characters can come across as frontierspeople, or toilers on a polar expedition. As she invokes a world of pounding hearts and thumping ears and watering mouths, she exhibits a refreshing freedom from embarrassment, an indifference to the concept of overkill. Oates’s friend the novelist John Gardner once suggested that she try writing a story “in which things go well, for a change.” That hasn’t happened yet. Her latest book, the enormous and frequently brilliant “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” (Ecco)—the forty-ninth novel she has published, if you exclude the ones she has written under pseudonyms—is a characteristic work. It begins with an act of police brutality, and proceeds to document the multifarious consequences for the victim’s wife and children: alcoholism, low-level criminality, marital breakdown, incipient nervous collapse. In a 1977 journal entry, Oates acknowledged that her work turns instinctively toward what she called “the central, centralizing act of violence that seems to symbolize something beyond itself.” Perhaps the most heavily ironic statement in her œuvre comes in her second novel, “A Garden of Earthly Delights” (1967), when a woman says, “Nobody killed nobody, this is the United States,” while the most characteristic piece of exposition may be found in “Little Bird of Heaven” (2009): “Daddy was bringing me home on that November evening not long before his death-by-firing-squad to a house from which he’d been banished by my mother.” Among contemporary American fiction writers—and, since the deaths of Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, she possesses a strong claim to preëminence—Oates most clearly displays what Henry James called “the imagination of disaster,” a faculty or frailty she often gives to her creations. (“Sometimes she thought idly about earthquakes, fires, buildings cracking in two,” we read in “them.” “She thought of fires, of bulldozers leveling trees and buildings.”) But where James wanted to tame his sense that life was ferocious and sinister, contingent and multiple, Oates taps her feeling of inner chaos as a creative resource. James said that the artist’s eternal problem was how to create a geometric pattern that disguises the fact that “relations stop nowhere”; Oates has talked of the elastic and the fluid. In 1968, she voiced a desire to publish “a long work with many characters, many events, a jagged and unclean plot, closely tied in with ‘reality’ ”—a formulation that would have kept James awake for months—and, whatever the charges that have been levelled at Oates’s work, she cannot be accused of failing to realize this ambition. In books as disparate as her first novel, the star-crossed romance “With Shuddering Fall” (1964), the celebrated urban epics “them” and “Wonderland” (1971), the unfairly derided mystic-politico-psychosexual thriller “The Assassins” (1975), the academic chamber piece “Marya: A Life” (1986), the Eisenhower-era chronicle “You Must Remember This” (1987), the Marilyn Monroe bio-fiction “Blonde” (2000), and the post-9/11 small-town mystery “Carthage” (2014), characters insist that experience is a mess of shards and shreds. Jessalyn McClaren, in “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.,” reflects that the mental mode she calls “widow-think,” far from helping her to navigate changed circumstances, is nothing more than “a barely controlled panic of neurons crazily firing.” Hermes tells Atlas that he is crushing someone's house with his thumb. “Got a message from Dimitri in Athens. He says your thumb is crushing his house.” Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby Even in a receptive climate, such an aesthetic would surely prove divisive, and the conditions have often been harsh. If Jinx Fairchild, straining to express his soul, is a stand-in for Oatesian principles, then Mrs. Dunphy, the senior-year English teacher, could be said to embody official literary standards. (The scene takes place in 1957.) She gives Jinx a D-plus and insists that he was lucky not to receive an F. “You know the rule,” she says. “No run-on sentences.” When Jinx resubmits his assignment, he receives a B-plus and the message is clear—in playing it safe, he is denying himself the opportunity to achieve something transcendent. Oates’s portrayal of killjoy politesse might be seen as a nose thumbed at grudging book reviewers, but her attitude toward Mrs. Dunphy’s strictures has deeper roots. Ahigh-achieving product of nineteen-fifties academe—she was the valedictorian of her graduating class at Syracuse University, in 1960—Oates rejected what she saw as the prevailing pieties of literary conduct: “symmetry, unity of tone, precision.” In a study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry—one of a series of strikingly ambitious literary essays she has published—she took aim at the rationalist agenda promoted by the eminent critic R. P. Blackmur, who had led the Henry James revival in 1934, with an edition of James’s prefaces (“The Art of the Novel”). In an essay on Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed,” Oates lamented that critics with a “Jamesian sensibility . . . simply cannot see” the structure of longer novels, and argued that the loose baggy monster—in James’s notorious phrase—“is loose and baggy and monstrous only to the critic who confuses his own relative short-sightedness with an aesthetic principle.” Oates wasn’t alone in this crusade—at least, not at first. In 1949, when she was a schoolgirl in Niagara County, the Nobel Prize was awarded to William Faulkner, a writer who was steeped in the work of Dostoyevsky and dismissed James as a “prig.” Many of the best-known novelists who emerged during those years—Lessing, Bellow, Mailer, Styron—had paid tribute to the Russian model. In criticism, too, escape routes from the formalist cul-de-sac were taken up in, notably, Iris Murdoch’s polemics “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” (1959) and “Against Dryness” (1961), and in Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending” (1967), a study of “the dilemma of fiction and reality” that considers the devices used by “The Idiot.” And Blackmur himself had a change of heart, embracing a radical new position that yielded essays such as “The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James” (1951) and a study of the European novel that dwells on the work of Dostoyevsky, presented as explicitly superior to the products of “form.” What distinguishes Oates’s record is not just longevity but doggedness. For a while, she had a kindred spirit in Iris Murdoch, who, around 1970, started writing novels in a mode that Oates called “self-consciously ‘Russian,’ ” being “looser, freer, more ribald,” notable for a “breathless, plunging, unedited” voice and “unresolved, troubling, provocative endings.” By contrast, Bellow’s books became shorter and tidier, and, anyway, for all the creative ebullience—the “waterfalls of self-displaying energy”—exhibited in a novel like “Humboldt’s Gift,” his had always been, in Oates’s view, an art of “accommodation, not terror.” And Oates’s contemporary Anne Tyler, a onetime grad student in Slavic studies whose early books “resembled the meandering of streams,” had been seduced by the charms of conventional structure. Oates, all the while, favored the flood over the levee, while striving to curb the mysticism and the slaloming plotlines of the books she published in the years after completing the Wonderland Quartet. Exorbitant attacks appeared (one by James Wolcott, in Harper’s, was titled “Stop Me Before I Write Again”). But despite her view that J. D. Salinger’s “dignified withdrawal into silence is understandable,” given the “jeering and dismissive” critical response to his last published work, silence was never likely to be her path. Like Philip Roth, who followed a late-sixties sensation (“Portnoy’s Complaint”) with a series of near-misses and outright duds and then regrouped, Oates produced an amazing run of books, starting in the mid-nineteen-eighties, with a similar emphasis on history and autobiography, which has continued today, notably “Marya,” “Because It Is Bitter,” “Black Water” (1992), “What I Lived For” (1994), “Zombie” (1995), “Blonde,” “Missing Mom” (2005), “The Gravedigger’s Daughter” (2007), “Carthage,” and “A Book of American Martyrs” (2017). She has received a shelf’s worth of lifetime-achievement awards—including, in May, the Institut de France’s two-hundred-thousand-euro Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca. If this feat of rallying and renewal has not attained the same legendary status as the achievement known as “late Roth,” it is partly because Roth found a palatable compromise—coursing fluency repurposed as oratorical clarity—while Oates refused to adapt her vision of how a novel should behave. Just as Jules, in “them,” aspires “to break free of the morass of the flesh” and become “pure spirit,” so Oates has wanted to do away with customary modes of reference and description, to be free to write in a way “quite unredeemed by poetic grace,” in a phrase from her study of D. H. Lawrence. (She described the language in one of her novels as “deliberately clumsy at times.”) She has wanted to be able to leave behind, when it suits her purposes, the embankments of orderly syntax and plot. That her counter-aesthetic represents a set of convictions, and not any deficiencies of technique, was made plain, in 1996, by the publication of “We Were the Mulvaneys,” which appeared on the Times best-seller list and was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. It’s a classically accomplished piece of work, with resemblances to Roth’s “American Pastoral.” Oates’s latest novel begins more or less where “We Were the Mulvaneys” more or less ended, in an intensive-care unit, with the death of a patriarch. The opening scene takes place on an afternoon in the fall of 2010, when Whitey McClaren, a sixty-seven-year-old businessman and onetime mayor of Hammond, New York, pulls off the highway near his home town, just beyond a “grimy and graffiti-defaced” overpass, to approach a pair of patrol cops in the process of attacking a “dark-skinned young man,” and is beaten up and then tased. (“Trying to rise. Oh but his heart is pounding—hard.”) From this briskly brutal scene, Oates spins a seven-hundred-and-eighty-page portrait of rumination, recrimination, and renewal. “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.”—the title comes from Whitman—is a novel of aftermath, an epilogue drawn to epic length, the story of what happens to a group of people robbed of their “lynchpin” or “anchor.” (Oates employed a similar narrative strategy in “Assassins” and in her 2001 novel “Middle Age: A Romance.”) “We Were the Mulvaneys” was rare among Oates’s books in using a single first-person narrator. The new novel is written in her favored roaming third person, and is told from more than half a dozen perspectives. There are two McClaren sons: Thom, in his late thirties, the second-in-command at McClaren, Inc.—a commercial printer that long ago diversified—and the runt of the litter, Virgil, a thirty-one-year-old artist and dropout. There are three daughters, Beverly (prom queen turned bored housewife), Lorene (local high-school principal), and Sophia (a pharmaceutical-lab assistant), as well as Jessalyn, their beloved “mommy.” Whitey’s death sends the remaining McClarens into various crises—prompting Sophia, for example, to reëxamine everything she previously knew, from familiar roads to professional habits. (She no longer feels comfortable killing animals for lab tests.) Family life is a suitable subject for a novelist with Oates’s emphases. As well as serving as a mirror of mores, a site for drama and violence (“a battleground,” in the words of one character), it is also an occasion for sensory description, challenging the writer to convey what the psychoanalyst R. D. Laing called “the texture, the taste one might say,” of familial experience. The family unit is also a breeding ground for myth. “You may have thought our family was larger,” Judd Mulvaney recalls; in the new novel, it isn’t long before we discover that there’s more to Whitey McClaren than his “good-natured and approachable” persona. And so the family theme mobilizes Oates’s essential skepticism. Although she has written frequently about social injustices—“them” culminates in the 1967 Detroit riot—she is not so much a realist as an impressionist, with a gift for a poetic and idiosyncratic kind of group portraiture. “Impossible to characterize our family’s experience,” a man reflects in the early pages of her best-selling gothic saga “Bellefleur” (1980): “Are we beset by tragedy, or merely farce?—or melodrama?—or pranks of fate, sheer happenstance, that cannot be deciphered?” There is no answer, and no higher force to whom we might appeal for judgment. As the narrator of her Princeton-set horror novel, “The Accursed,” warns, in an author’s note, “There may be multiple, and competing, histories; as there are multiple, and competing, eyewitness accounts.” Or, in Judd’s words, “What is a family, after all, except memories?” To Oates, the reality of family life is social reality in excelsis, and perhaps the ultimate subject for a novel. (Many of Oates’s favorite works in the form—“The Brothers Karamazov,” “Women in Love,” “The Sound and the Fury”—tussle with saga conventions.) The pinballing point of view of Oates’s novel unsettles any fixed concept of the local institution known as “the McClarens.” When we read about “the wonder of an older brother to a younger,” this is just one of a vast number of permutations. Elsewhere, we are shown the burden represented by a younger brother to an older, and the “innocently-sisterly” way in which the housewife Beverly can be rude to the slightly younger high-school principal Lorene; when Beverly is using her “good-daughter” voice on the phone to Jessalyn, it’s “bright-glittering like bubbles on a stream beneath which, if you looked closely, you’d see sharp-edged rocks and rubble.” The novel has been constructed to maximize flexibility. Among its fifty-two chapters is a brief composite picture entitled “Recurring Dreams of the McClaren Children.” An isolated vignette—“The Widow’s Orgy”—shows Jessalyn giddily emptying Whitey’s expensive liquor bottles into the kitchen sink. (“Oh, Mom. What on earth have you done.”) And toward the end, in another vignette, we are reminded that Beverly, the daughter lost in grief, is a mother, too: Heedless Brianna came in, bounding up the stairs in jeans so tight-fitting slender legs, thighs, buttocks you could wonder (her mother wonders!) how in hell the girl can breathe, ponytail bouncing sassily behind her, of course Beverly lowered her voice so the girl wouldn’t hear, certain that the girl could not hear, and some minutes later there came Brianna in reverse, out of her room and down the stairs thudding on her heels with the arrogance of one who weighs two hundred pounds and not one hundred, and again Beverly lowered her voice out of maternal discretion just as Brianna halted at the foot of the stairs and turned to her, twisting at the waist like a dancer in a brilliantly tortured posture, young face livid with indignation: “For God’s sake, Mom! Grandpa Whitey is gone.” Two people play a claw machine game called 'Things to talk about.' Cartoon by Sofia Warren If Dostoyevsky was a specialist in the “dialogical,” Oates serves up something altogether more churning and (to borrow a term of praise, from a 1977 journal entry) “agonizingly thorough.” For a while, the novel seems to be concerned with Thom’s attempt to achieve legal justice for Whitey’s death, and with his attempts to frighten off Jessalyn’s new boyfriend, Hugo Martinez, a Newark-born photographer and poet whom some of the McClaren children view as a gold-digger. (“How would Mom ever meet a Cuban?” Lorene wonders.) Yet neither of Thom’s projects comes to dominate our interest. And the novel is so teeming with nuances and details and inklings that you barely have time to register the irony that Whitey died in the course of defending a victim of racial profiling, despite having been soft on police violence during his time as Hammond’s mayor—or that Thom’s two causes are inherently at odds, one pertaining to the fallout of a racially charged assault, the other incipiently racist. At times, there’s little to hold on to. But then, why should the reader be afforded the feeling of terra firma so persistently denied to the characters? As soon as Jessalyn has started enjoying the memory of the stone house at 99 Old Farm Road, filled with her five children and their five sets of friends, she corrects herself: “Well, that wasn’t accurate perhaps. By the time Virgil was old enough to bring friends home, Thom was too old to wish to bring his friends home; not to mention those girlfriends of Thom’s he hadn’t dared bring home.” When she reflects that “a widow’s life” is “a posthumous life; a left-over life, you could say,” she realizes that putting such a melancholy truth into words makes it “sound exalted and profound somehow,” when in fact the widow’s condition was “a diminishment, like a wizened pea or a crumpled napkin.” But even to say that is “to hope to inflate the diminishment, and in this hope there was folly.” Cliché after cliché is tested and then dispatched, along with any sense of consolation. Oates’s habits are designed to unsettle us and, though pleasure is never out of the equation, the novel avoids many traditional narrative strategies for ginning up tension. The reader is shown, long before any of the surviving characters are, the circumstances of the novel’s central narrative event. Whitey’s roadside encounter with the Hammond police is presented as answers to a series of factual questions (Why did he pull over? Where had he been driving from?). And a character can be introduced with the syntactic equivalent of a four-car pileup: Just a glance at Thom McClaren, tall and rangy-limbed, sandy-haired, handsome face now just perceptibly beginning to thicken, in his late thirties—(Virgil often stared, when [he believed] Thom wasn’t aware of him)—you could see that Thom was one of those persons who feels very good about himself, and his self-estimate is (largely) shared by those who gaze upon him. (The brackets are hers.) Now and again, you’re reminded of Martin Amis’s grievance that, though James Joyce could take you anywhere, he keeps taking you places you don’t want to go. And yet there is great joy to be derived from the novel’s submerged patterns, its mind-boggling fecundity, its gallimaufry of devices (stream of consciousness, analytic omniscience, sentences both snaking and staccato), its combination of intricacy and lucidity. An early chapter called “The Seed” moves from the McClaren children waking up in the family home, via some reflections on sibling order, to an unsituated flashback of Virgil explaining that he wants to drift like a cottonwood seed, and his father telling him that a seed is supposed to take root and grow. The evocation of an extended period (“In his twenties he’d disappeared for weeks, months at a time”) then settles into a dramatic scene, a debate between Virgil and Whitey on the concept of “use”; Whitey thinks that “we are here on earth to be of use,” while Virgil wants to know “what kind of use, for whose use, at what price to the user.” The debate, in which Jessalyn “intervened, gently,” is seen from various perspectives: Sophia, usually Virgil’s ally, hopes this time that their father will rebuke him; “the McClaren siblings” collectively notice that Virgil never seems hurt by Whitey’s remarks; Virgil thinks, “This was unfair! And inaccurate!”; and Whitey feels frustrated that he cannot defeat his own son in argument, while regretting that he had agreed to give him that eccentric name. (“Not likely . . . that he’d have such frustrating experiences with a son named Matthew.”) The rest of the chapter canters through Virgil’s past: loving poetry and painting as a “dreamy child”; enrolling at Oberlin College, and then leaving; accepting a teaching job in North Hammond, and then resigning; struggling to articulate his philosophy of “extreme altruism”; and slipping into codependency with Jessalyn (“You are ‘enabling’ our son,” Whitey tells her, using a piece of newly acquired jargon). Then we slip back into the family’s bedside vigil. Although Oates rejects cohesion as a formal virtue, she has a coherent vision of what literature can deliver. She believes in the itching and the ornery and the oddly shaped, and has been trying to produce fiction that feels as irreducible to simple meanings, as resistant to paraphrase, as the subject matter it portrays. The heroic figures in “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” are Jessalyn and Hugo Martinez and, perhaps above all, Virgil. The other McClaren siblings represent a bullying orthodoxy, like the “tradition-oriented critics” of the fifties. “He doesn’t care at all that Daddy is seriously ill,” an unnamed McClaren says of Virgil, while Beverly claims that some part of Virgil’s brain is missing—“the part that is sensitive to social cues.” The four-page scene that follows, beginning “Hi, Dad,” makes it clear that Virgil cares as much as anybody. At one point, he takes a deep breath, lifts a handmade woodwind instrument to his mouth, and produces, Oates tells us, a series of earnest, breathy notes “so airy, you couldn’t define them as flute-sounds.” ♦ Joyce Carol Oates, pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, (born June 16, 1938, Lockport, New York, U.S.), American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist noted for her vast literary output in a variety of styles and genres. Particularly effective are her depictions of violence and evil in modern society. Joyce Carol Oates QUICK FACTS Joyce Carol Oates View Media Page BORN June 16, 1938 (age 82) Lockport, New York NOTABLE WORKS “them” “Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway” “We Were the Mulvaneys” “Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You” “The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age, The” “Do with Me What You Will” “Broke Heart Blues” “In Rough Country” “My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike” “Daddy Love” AWARDS AND HONORS National Book Critics’ Circle Award (2009) National Book Award Oates was born in New York state, the daughter of a tool-and-die designer and a homemaker. She studied English at Syracuse University (B.A., 1960) and the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1961). She taught English at the University of Detroit from 1961 to 1967 and at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, from 1967 to 1978. From 1978 she taught at Princeton University. In 1961 she married Raymond J. Smith (died 2008), a fellow English student who himself became a professor and an editor. With him she published The Ontario Review, a literary magazine. BRITANNICA EXPLORES 100 WOMEN TRAILBLAZERS Meet extraordinary women who dared to bring gender equality and other issues to the forefront. From overcoming oppression, to breaking rules, to reimagining the world or waging a rebellion, these women of history have a story to tell. Early in her career Oates contributed short stories to a number of magazines and reviews, including the Prairie Schooner, Literary Review, Southwest Review, and Epoch, and in 1963 she published her first collection of short stories, By the North Gate. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, appeared in 1964 and was followed by a second short-story collection, Upon the Sweeping Flood (1965). She wrote prolifically thereafter, averaging about two books per year. Her notable fiction works include A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969; winner of a National Book Award), Do with Me What You Will (1973), Black Water (1992), Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), Zombie (1995), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), Broke Heart Blues (1999), The Falls (2004), My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008), Mudwoman (2012), Daddy Love (2013), Carthage (2014), Jack of Spades (2015), The Man Without a Shadow (2016), and Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. (2020). Her forays into young adult fiction included Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002) and Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You (2012). Joyce Carol Oates Joyce Carol Oates Joyce Carol Oates, 1992. AP/REX/Shutterstock.com Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now In 2001 Oates published the short-story collection Faithless: Tales of Transgression, “richly various” tales of sin. An extensive and mainly retrospective volume of her stories, High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006, was released in 2006. Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (2008) featured fictionalized accounts of the final days of various iconic American writers. The stories in Black Dahlia and White Rose (2012) were threaded with menace and violence; the title piece fictionalized the sensational 1947 Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles. Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong (2014) features tales that explore the sinister possibilities of romantic entanglement. Oates’s other short-story collections included The (Other) You (2021), in which characters contemplate regret and missed opportunities. Oates also wrote mysteries (under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly), plays, essays, poetry, and literary criticism. Essays, reviews, and other prose pieces are included in Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (1999) and In Rough Country (2010). In 2011 Oates published the memoir A Widow’s Story, in which she mourned her husband’s death. The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (2015) is a memoir elliptically documenting her childhood. Oates’s novels encompass a variety of historical settings and literary genres. She typically portrays American individuals whose intensely experienced and obsessive lives end in bloodshed and self-destruction owing to larger forces beyond their control. Her books blend a realistic treatment of everyday life with horrific and even sensational depictions of violence. hen Joyce Carol Oates, the 77-year-old author of well over 100 books, told the New Yorker last year that she thought of herself as “transparent”, before adding “I’m not sure I really have a personality”, the admission felt scandalous. We live in a time when the concept of personhood has been enshrined, in the monetising parlance of late capitalism, as “my personal brand”. To posit its non-existence is a kind of taboo. Especially if you happen to be someone often described as “America’s foremost woman of letters”. Oates, a five-time Pulitzer finalist, might be “very intensely interested in a portrait of America”, but clearly she has no truck with the ego-vaunting, personality driven paradigm of contemporary celebrity. She appears more to belong to some other, long-passed era, with a pronounced gothic streak colouring much of her fiction, which tends to be peopled by powerful men and introverted women who frequently experience sexual shame. In the afterword to her 1994 collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, she seems to find a human truth within horror: “We should sense immediately, in the presence of the grotesque, that it is both ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ simultaneously, as states of mind are real enough – emotions, moods, shifting obsessions, beliefs – though immeasurable. The subjectivity that is the essence of the human is also the mystery that divides us irrevocably from one another.” At her home in rural New Jersey she serves mugs of herbal tea and when her bengal kitten, Cleopatra, settles against my leg, Oates says: “I see you have quite a conquest there. She assumes you’re here to meet her.” I am here, of course, to talk to Oates about herself and her work, but “I’m not so interested in myself … ” she says. “I remember somebody saying that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton loved to go bar-hopping in New York, and the last thing they wanted to talk about was themselves – they were more interested in these characters in the bars. That’s the way I think many writers are. I feel that way. And it’s often said about Shakespeare that he was transparent, and Keats that he had this negative capability to be interested in other things.” Specifically, I’m here to speak to her about her new novel The Man Without a Shadow, her 44th under her own name to go alongside her many collections of stories, essays and plays, her memoirs and her novels written under pseudonyms. It concerns the relationship between an amnesiac, Elihu Hoopes, and a neuroscientist, Margot Sharpe, for whom Hoopes is both enduring scientific subject and lifelong love object. She is a woman who “can’t bear herself except as a vessel of work”. She is also a person who wonders, “What if I have no ‘person’ – what will I do then?” Oates is straightforward about the personal parallels. “I very much identify with Margot.” And not just for her workaholic tendencies and personality doubt. “I think,” she ventures, “we’re continually inventing narratives and filling in blanks and misremembering in ways that bolster our interpretation of something. So I wanted to write about this relationship between two people engaged in different memories.” Since his memory extends no further than 70 seconds, Elihu experiences every meeting with Margot as a first. Accordingly, the novel is written entirely in the present tense, the state in which Elihu lives. In one sense then, their love is literally without foundation: how can you form any meaningful connection in a little over a minute? Yet there’s also something pure about their relationship: each encounter has the wonder of the eternally new. Joyce Carol Oates and her first husband Raymond Smith Joyce Carol Oates and her first husband Raymond Smith. Photograph: Eva Haggdahl/PR “The relationship between them is always sort of unreal,” she says, “but I’m wondering if many relationships that are based on love and romance are not pretty highly charged with unreality. When you’re actually living with someone over a period of time you do get to know the person in a very complex and detailed way. But the romantic ideal is very much fraught with the possibility of conditioning people. Presenting your best self. Saying things to the other that will elicit a certain response.” Oates was married for 47 years to Raymond J Smith, a professor and editor of the Ontario Review, which he and Oates founded together in 1974. After he died in 2008 from complications arising from pneumonia, Oates detailed her grief in an acclaimed memoir, A Widow’s Story. Soon after, she met and married Charlie Gross, a neuroscientist. Gross has been a particularly enthusiastic reader of the latest novel, which has come about, she says, directly as a consequence of writing A Widow’s Story and having to deal so rigorously with her own memory. Oates usually works on several projects at once, but it was only after she’d finished the memoir that she was able to return to writing novels and stories. “Writing fiction is hard to do when real life seems so much more important,” she explains. Writing fiction is hard to do when real life seems so much more important Nevertheless: “I don’t have any anxiety about writing. Not really. It’s such a pleasure, and our lives are so relatively easy compared to people who are really out there in the world working hard and suffering. The art comes much later in civilisation, when you’ve dealt with other things like poverty and strife. People think that I write quickly, but I actually don’t. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Am I still working on this novel?’ It’s such a slow evolution. The point of anxiety is lost in all that. You can’t be anxious every minute of every day for eight months.” Oates’s extraordinary work ethic – she writes eight hours a day – is such that we now have a virtual sub-genre of literature that we might call “where to start with Joyce Carol Oates”. It’s a phenomenon she mocks wryly in The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982: “The list of my books ... is overwhelming. So many books! So many!” Her very first was By the North Gate, a short story collection published in 1963, but it was her fifth book, them, a 1969 novel, that won her a National book award and confirmed Oates as a major writer. Blonde, her 2000 fictionalisation of Marilyn Monroe’s inner life, is often regarded as her best novel (it was nominated for both a Pulitzer and a National book award) although many readers first encounter her through the repeatedly anthologised “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been”, a nuanced story of a young girl’s rape, in which every sentence is taut with something lethal. A Widow's Story: A Memoir by Joyce Carol Oates – review Read more And then there’s her criticism: lengthy, dispassionate and thorough pieces for the New York Review of Books for which she reads each author exhaustively. She recalls, for example, “sitting in Dallas airport with all these books of Cormac McCarthy – literal books, I wasn’t reading on a Kindle – and I thought I’m dragging all these books around, and they’re so depressing! But he’s such a good writer ...” This is where I confess to her that, in this case, I failed to adhere to my usual rule of reading a writer’s entire backlist before an interview. “Well, you can’t possibly … ” she murmurs. “Maybe that was asking too much of yourself, just in general.” The JCO completists in this world must be few. “There’s a man named Greg Johnson who’s written a biography of me,” she says. “And then maybe a few other people.” I ask whether JM Coetzee’s job description of a writer as “a secretary of the invisible” resonates with her. (Coincidentally, Johnson’s 1999 biography is titled Invisible Writer.) “I’m obviously creating,” she counters. “Coetzee is somewhat coy ... A secretary is someone who takes notes, but a novelist has a strong will, and is creating narrative situations, bringing people together, telling a story. It’s a very wilful thing, and Coetzee is a very wilful person as an artist. There’s a will; it should be invisible. No one should really know about it.” Then I broach the subject of another form of writing. Oates, who has nearly 140,000 Twitter followers, has become notorious for missives met with derision or collective “huh?”s. When she asked, “All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive?” it prompted the actor Molly Ringwald to respond, “Okay, who got Grandma stoned?” Nobody makes anybody write tweets, so the negative response that one gets is … basically, in a way you deserve it Most egregious was a tweet that seemed to conflate violence against women with Islam. “Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic – Egypt – natural to inquire: what’s the predominant religion?” I venture that this was Islamophobic. “Well, some of the reactions are sympathetic ... It’s all sort of political. But my fundamental focus is the rights of women and girls – and patriarchal religion, no matter what it is, I’m not sympathetic to. I have confessed that often on Twitter, that I don’t believe in patriarchal religion – to me it’s delusional, so if that’s Islamophobic, I suppose that could be true. It’s more like religion-phobic, or patriarchal religion-phobic. What I had to say was actually much, much longer than could be said in a tweet. But nobody makes anybody write tweets, so the negative response that one gets is … basically, in a way you deserve it. I’ve tweeted other things that I’ve meant sincerely, but sometimes people misinterpret it.” She adds, wearily: “I don’t really care that much. I write something nice about Homeland, but a bunch of people write back to say ‘Oh, we hate Homeland, it’s Islamophobic.’ I literally don’t care. I don’t even read them. They’re sort of attacking a tweet, then it’s gone. The fickle memory of Americans is something you can rely on. The literary world is very different, and I’m much more serious about the literary world. I write these reviews which are quite long and nuanced for the New York Review of Books – that’s really like my real life.” When I’ve thanked her and we’ve both stood up there’s a moment of mutual uncertainty. Oates surely wants to get back to work, but the car I’ve yet to summon will probably take 20 minutes to arrive. I gesture at a small floral couch by the front door and suggest I’ll just wait there. Upstairs, I can hear the sound of Oates’s contented humming receding as she moves towards her desk. I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life. America's Foremost Woman of Letters DATE OF BIRTH June 16, 1938 Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She grew up on her parents’ farm, outside the town, and went to the same one-room schoolhouse her mother had attended. This rural area of upstate New York, straddling Niagara and Erie Counties, had been hit hard by the Great Depression. The few industries the area enjoyed suffered frequent closures and layoffs. Farm families worked desperately hard to sustain meager subsistence. But young Joyce enjoyed the natural environment of farm country, and displayed a precocious interest in books and writing. Although her parents had little education, they encouraged her ambitions. When, at age 14, her grandmother provided her with her first typewriter, she began consciously preparing herself, “writing novel after novel” throughout high school and college. Joyce Carol Oates, pictured on Easter, 1949. It is strange, she says, to live so long that you are older than your own parents were when they died. She uses the word "vertiginous" to describe the dizzying sensation of looking back on your life from a distance you can't believe you've traveled. 1949: Joyce Carol Oates, pictured on Easter, in her hometown of Lockport, New York. It is strange, she says, to live so long that you are older than your own parents were when they died. Oates uses the word “vertiginous” to describe the dizzying sensation of looking back on your life from a distance you can’t believe you’ve traveled. When she transferred to the high school in Lockport, she quickly distinguished herself. An excellent student, she contributed to her high school newspaper and won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she majored in English. When she was only 19, she won the “college short story” contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. Joyce Carol Oates was valedictorian of her graduating class. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she earned her master’s in a single year at the University of Wisconsin. While studying in Wisconsin she met Raymond Smith. The two were married after a three-month courtship. 1972: Joyce Carol Oates and her husband Raymond Smith. In "A Widow’s Story: A Memoir," Oates writes about the sudden death of her husband Ray, to whom she was married for more than 47 years, and of the paralyzing months spent coming to terms with the terrible loss. 1972: Joyce Carol Oates and her husband Raymond Smith. In A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, Oates writes about the sudden death of her husband Ray, to whom she was married for more than 47 years, and of the paralyzing months spent coming to terms with the terrible loss. The book is one woman’s struggle to understand a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. As Oates’ publisher states, she “has written about the pain and madness that enveloped her during the year that followed her husband’s death.” In 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, Michigan. Joyce taught at the University of Detroit and had a front-row seat for the social turmoil engulfing America’s cities in the 1960s. These violent realities informed much of her early fiction. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published when she was 28. Her novel them received the National Book Award. 1969: "them" is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the third in the Wonderland Quartet she inaugurated with "A Garden of Earthly Delights." It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1970. 1969: them is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the third in the Wonderland Quartet she inaugurated with A Garden of Earthly Delights. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1970. In a foreward to the book, Oates states that for the most part, them is based upon a real family. In an addendum to the afterforeward, Joyce Carol Oates clarifies “the realist element was a literary device: all characters and events are entirely fictional.” The novel has been praised for its “commentary on the difficulties faced by the American working class and depiction of lower class tragedy through its descriptions of urban life and the interweaving of colloquial language with prose.” In 1968, Joyce took a job at the University of Windsor, and the couple moved across the Detroit River to Windsor, in the Canadian province of Ontario. In the ten years that followed, Joyce Carol Oates published new books at the extraordinary rate of two or three per year, while teaching full-time. Many of her novels sold well; her short stories and critical essays solidified her reputation. Despite some critical grumbling about her phenomenal productivity, Oates had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States though only in her thirties. Joyce Carol Oates (Marion Ettlinger) Joyce Carol Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978 and is currently the Roger S. Berlind Professor Emeritus in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. She retired from teaching in 2014. (M. Ettlinger) While still in Canada, Oates and her husband started a small press and began to publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review. They continued these activities after 1978, when they moved to Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1978, Joyce Carol Oates has taught in the creative writing program at Princeton University, where she has mentored numerous young writers, including Jonathan Safran Foer. Her literary work continued unabated. March 2010: President Obama awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal to Joyce Carol Oates for her contributions to American letters. March 2010: President Barack Obama awarded the National Humanities Medal at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House to Joyce Carol Oates for a lifetime of contributions to American literature as author of 50 novels. In the early 1980s, Oates surprised critics and readers with a series of novels, beginning with Bellefleur, in which she reinvented the conventions of Gothic fiction, using them to re-imagine whole stretches of American history. Just as suddenly, she returned, at the end of the decade, to her familiar realistic ground with a series of ambitious family chronicles, including You Must Remember This, and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. The novels Solstice and Marya: A Life also date from this period, and use the materials of her family and childhood to create moving studies of the female experience. In addition to her literary fiction, she has written a series of experimental suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. August 2012: Joyce Carol Oates seen before speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland. (MURDO MACLEOD) 2012: Joyce Carol Oates seen before speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland. As of this writing, Joyce Carol Oates has written 56 novels, over 30 collections of short stories, eight volumes of poetry, plays, innumerable essays and book reviews, as well as longer nonfiction works on literary subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the fiction of Dostoyevsky and James Joyce, to studies of the gothic and horror genres, and on such non-literary subjects as the painter George Bellows and the boxer Mike Tyson. In 1996, Oates received the PEN/Malamud Award for “a lifetime of literary achievement.” 2014: Joyce Carol Oates (Corbis) 2014: Joyce Carol Oates writes in longhand, working from “8am until 1pm everyday, then again for two or three hours in the evening.” Oates’ “prolificacy has become one of her best-known attributes, although often discussed disparagingly.” In 2007, it was suggested that disparaging criticism of Oates “derives from reviewers angst, ‘How does one judge a new book by Oates, when one is not familiar with most of the backlist? Where does one start?'” Oates was asked what books she will be remembered for, and which would she most want a first-time Oates reader to read. She responded with, them and Blond, although she “could have easily chosen a number of titles.” Her husband, Raymond Smith, died in 2008, shortly before the publication of her 32nd collection of short stories, Dear Husband. The following year, Oates married Professor Charles Gross, of the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton. In the months following Raymond Smith’s death, and before she met Dr. Gross, she suffered from severe depression and suicidal thoughts. She described this experience vividly in the memoir A Widow’s Tale, published in 2011. Today, Joyce Carol Oates continues to live and write in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Her most recent books include the novel The Accursed — an eerie and stunning tale of psychological horror — and the short-story collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories — a collection of ten mesmerizing stories that map the disturbing darkness within us all — which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels 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 each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award,[1] for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019). Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.[2] She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches short fiction.[3] Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.[4] Contents 1 Early life and education 2 University 3 Career 3.1 Ontario Review 3.2 Teaching career 4 Views 4.1 Religion 4.2 Politics 4.3 Twitter 5 Productivity 6 Bibliography 7 Awards and honors 7.1 Winner 7.2 Finalist 7.3 Nominated 8 Personal life 9 References 10 External links Early life and education Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent,[5][6] and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer.[5] She grew up on her parents' farm outside the town. Her brother, Fred Jr., was born in 1943, and her sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely autistic, was born in 1956.[5] Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York,[7] and characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status",[5] but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence".[8] Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce.[7] 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).[7] Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child.[5] She became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!"[9] In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose "influences remain very deep".[10] Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter.[7] Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools[5] and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper.[11] She was the first in her family to complete high school.[5] As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[12] University Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined Phi Mu.[13][failed verification] Oates found Syracuse to be "a very exciting place academically and intellectually", and trained herself by "writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them".[14] It was at this point that Oates began reading the work of Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O'Connor, and she noted, "these influences are still quite strong, pervasive".[10] At the age of 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates graduated Phi Beta Kappa[15] and valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960,[16] and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961. She was a Ph.D. student at Rice University but left to become a full-time writer.[17] Evelyn Shrifte, president of the Vanguard Press, met Oates soon after Oates received her master's degree. "She was fresh out of school, and I thought she was a genius," Shrifte said. Vanguard published Oates' first book, the short-story collection By the North Gate, in 1963.[18] Career The Vanguard Press published Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was 26 years old. In 1966, she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and written after listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue".[19] The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson".[20] It has been anthologized many times and adapted as a film, Smooth Talk starring Laura Dern (1985). In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?".[21] Another early short story, "In a Region of Ice" (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1966[22]), features a young, gifted Jewish-American student. It dramatizes his drift into protest against the world of education and the sober, established society of his parents, his depression, and eventually murder-cum-suicide. It was inspired by a real-life incident (as were several of her works) and Oates had been acquainted with the model of her protagonist. She revisited this subject in the title story of her collection Last Days: Stories (1984). "In the Region of Ice" won the first of her two O. Henry Awards.[22] Her second novel was A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), first of the so-called Wonderland Quartet published by Vanguard 1967–71. All were finalists for the annual National Book Award. The third novel in the series, them (1969), won the 1970 National Book Award for Fiction.[1] It is set in Detroit during a time span from the 1930s to the 1960s, most of it in black ghetto neighborhoods, and deals openly with crime, drugs, and racial and class conflicts. Again, some of the key characters and events were based on real people whom Oates had known or heard of during her years in the city. Since then she has published an average of two books a year. Frequent topics in her work include rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, female childhood and adolescence, and occasionally the supernatural.[citation needed] Violence is a constant in her work, even leading Oates to have written an essay in response to the question, "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?"[23] In 1990, she discussed her novel, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, which also deals with themes of racial tension, and described "the experience of writing [it]" as "so intense it seemed almost electric".[24] She is a fan of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, describing Plath's sole novel The Bell Jar as a "near perfect work of art", but though Oates has often been compared to Plath, she disavows Plath's romanticism about suicide, and among her characters, she favors cunning, hardy survivors, both women and men.[citation needed] In the early 1980s, Oates began writing stories in the Gothic and horror genres; in her foray into these genres, Oates said she was "deeply influenced" by Kafka and felt "a writerly kinship" with James Joyce.[8] In 1996, Oates published We Were the Mulvaneys, a novel following the disintegration of an American family, which became a best-seller after being selected by Oprah's Book Club in 2001.[21] In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oates wrote several books, mostly suspense novels, under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.[25] Since at least the early 1980s, Oates has been rumored to be a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature by oddsmakers and critics.[26] Her papers, held at Syracuse University, include 17 unpublished short stories and four unpublished or unfinished novellas. Oates has said that most of her early unpublished work was "cheerfully thrown away".[27] One review of Oates's 1970 story collection The Wheel of Love characterized her as an author "of considerable talent" but at that time "far from being a great writer".[28] Oates's 2006 short story "Landfill" was criticized because it drew on the death, several months earlier, of John A. Fiocco Jr., a 19-year-old New Jersey college student.[29][30] In 1998, Oates received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, which is given annually to recognize outstanding achievement in American literature.[31] Ontario Review Oates founded The Ontario Review, a literary magazine, in 1974 in Canada, with Raymond J. Smith, her husband and fellow graduate student, who would eventually become a professor of 18th-century literature.[7] Smith served as editor of this venture, and Oates served as associate editor.[32] The magazine's mission, according to Smith, the editor, was to bridge the literary and artistic culture of the US and Canada: "We tried to do this by publishing writers and artists from both countries, as well as essays and reviews of an intercultural nature."[33] In 1978, Sylvester & Orphanos published Sentimental Education.[34] In 1980, Oates and Smith founded Ontario Review Books, an independent publishing house. In 2004, Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds – both my husband and I are so interested in literature and we read the same books; he'll be reading a book and then I'll read it – we trade and we talk about our reading at meal times ...".[5] Teaching career Oates taught in Beaumont, Texas, for a year, then moved to Detroit in 1962, where she began teaching at the University of Detroit. Influenced by the Vietnam war, the 1967 Detroit race riots, and a job offer, Oates moved across the river into Canada in 1968 with her husband, to a teaching position at the University of Windsor in Ontario.[5] In 1978, she moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and began teaching at Princeton University. Among others, Oates influenced Jonathan Safran Foer, who took an introductory writing course with Oates in 1995 as a Princeton undergraduate.[35] Foer recalled later that Oates took an interest in his writing and his "most important of writerly qualities, energy,"[36] noting that she was "the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that."[36] Oates served as Foer's senior thesis advisor, which was an early version of his novel Everything Is Illuminated (published to acclaim in 2002).[35] Oates retired from teaching at Princeton in 2014 and was honored at a retirement party in November of that year.[37][38] Joyce Carol Oates has taught creative short fiction at UC Berkeley since 2016 and offers her course in spring semesters.[39] Views Religion Oates was raised Catholic but as of 2007 is an atheist.[40] In an interview with Commonweal magazine, Oates stated, "I think of religion as a kind of psychological manifestation of deep powers, deep imaginative, mysterious powers which are always with us."[41] Politics Oates self-identifies as a liberal, and supports gun control.[42] She was a vocal critic of former US President Donald Trump and his policies, both in public and on Twitter.[43] Oates opposed the shuttering of cultural institutions on Trump's inauguration day as a protest against the president, stating "This would only hurt artists. Rather, cultural institutions should be sanctuaries for those repelled by the inauguration."[44] In January 2019, Oates stated that "Trump is like a figurehead, but I think what really controls everything is just a few really wealthy families or corporations."[45] Twitter Oates is a regular poster on Twitter with her account given to her by her publisher Harper Collins.[46] She has drawn particular criticism for the perceived Islamophobia of her tweets. Oates stated in her criticized tweet, "Where 99.3% of women report having been sexually harassed & rape is epidemic – Egypt – natural to inquire: what's the predominant religion?" She later backtracked from that statement.[47][48] Oates was also criticized for responding to a Mississippi school's pulling of To Kill a Mockingbird from its eighth grade curriculum with a tweet claiming that Mississippians don't read.[49] Oates defended her statements on Twitter saying, "I don't consider that I really said anything that I don't feel and I think that sometimes the crowd is not necessarily correct. You know, Kierkegaard said, 'The crowd is a lie.' The sort of lynch mob mentality among some people on Twitter and they rush after somebody – they rush in this direction; they rush over here; they're kind of rushing around the landscape of the news".[42] Productivity Oates writes in longhand,[50] working from "8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening."[26] Her prolificacy has become one of her best-known attributes, although often discussed disparagingly.[26] The New York Times wrote in 1989 that Oates's "name is synonymous with productivity",[51] and in 2004, The Guardian noted that "Nearly every review of an Oates book, it seems, begins with a list [of the number of books she has published]".[5] In a journal entry written in the 1970s, Oates sarcastically addressed her critics, writing, "So many books! so many! Obviously JCO has a full career behind her, if one chooses to look at it that way; many more titles and she might as well... what?... give up all hopes for a 'reputation'? […] but I work hard, and long, and as the hours roll by I seem to create more than I anticipate; more, certainly, than the literary world allows for a 'serious' writer. Yet I have more stories to tell, and more novels […] ".[52] In The New York Review of Books in 2007, Michael Dirda suggested that disparaging criticism of Oates "derives from reviewer's angst: How does one judge a new book by Oates when one is not familiar with most of the backlist? Where does one start?"[26] Several publications have published lists of what they deem the best Joyce Carol Oates books, designed to help introduce readers to the author's daunting body of work. In a 2003 article entitled "Joyce Carol Oates for dummies", The Rocky Mountain News recommended starting with her early short stories and the novels A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969), Wonderland (1971), Black Water (1992), and Blonde (2000).[53] In 2006, The Times listed them, On Boxing (in collaboration with photographer John Ranard) (1987), Black Water, and High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006) as "The Pick of Joyce Carol Oates".[54] In 2007, Entertainment Weekly listed its Oates favorites as Wonderland, Black Water, Blonde, I'll Take You There (2002), and The Falls (2004).[55] In 2003, Oates herself said that she thinks she will be remembered for, and would most want a first-time Oates reader to read, them and Blonde, although she "could as easily have chosen a number of titles."[56] Bibliography Main article: Joyce Carol Oates bibliography Oates's extensive bibliography contains poetry, plays, criticism, short fiction, and over fifty novels, including Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart; Black Water; Mudwoman; Carthage; The Man Without a Shadow; and A Book of American Martyrs. She has published several novels under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly".[57] Awards and honors Winner 1955-1956: Scholastic Art & Writing Award 1967: O. Henry Award – "In the Region of Ice"[22] 1968: M. L. Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters – A Garden of Earthly Delights 1970: National Book Award for Fiction – them[1] 1973: O. Henry Award – "The Dead"[22] 1988: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates[58][59] 1990: Rea Award for the Short Story 1996: Bram Stoker Award for Novel – Zombie 1996: PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story 1997: Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement [60] 2002: Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award[61] 2003: Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement (The Kenyon Review)[62] 2005: Prix Femina Etranger – The Falls 2006: Chicago Tribune Literary Prize[63] (Chicago Tribune) 2006: Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Mount Holyoke College[64] 2007: Humanist of the Year, American Humanist Association[65] 2009: Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, NBCC[66][67] 2010: National Humanities Medal[68] 2010: Fernanda Pivano Award 2011: Honorary Doctor of Arts, University of Pennsylvania[69] 2011: World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction – Fossil-Figures [70] 2012: Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection – The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares[citation needed] 2012: Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Oregon State University 2012: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement[71] 2013: Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection – Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories[citation needed] 2019: Jerusalem Prize, Lifetime Achievement 2020: Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, work as a message of modern humanism Finalist 1970: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – The Wheel of Love and Other Stories[72] 1993: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Black Water[73][74] 1995: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – What I Lived For[73] 2001: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Blonde[73] 2015: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories[73] Nominated 1963: O. Henry Award – Special Award for Continuing Achievement (1970), five Second Prize (1964 to 1989), two First Prize (above) among 29 nominations[22] 1968: National Book Award for Fiction – A Garden of Earthly Delights[75] 1969: National Book Award for Fiction – Expensive People[76] 1972: National Book Award for Fiction – Wonderland[77][78] 1990: National Book Award for Fiction – Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart[79] 1992: National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction – Black Water[66] 1995: PEN/Faulkner Award – What I Lived For[80] 2000: National Book Award – Blonde[81] 2007: National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction – The Gravedigger's Daughter[66] 2007: National Book Critics Circle Award, Memoir/Autobiography – The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973–1982[66] 2013: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories[82] Personal life Oates in 2013 Oates met Raymond J. Smith, a fellow graduate student, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and they married in 1961.[7] Smith became a professor of 18th-century literature and, later, an editor and publisher. Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds..." and "a very collaborative and imaginative marriage".[5] Smith died of complications from pneumonia on February 18, 2008, and the death affected Oates profoundly.[32] In April 2008, Oates wrote to an interviewer, "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really have very little energy [...] My marriage – my love for my husband – seems to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment."[83][84] After six months of near suicidal grieving for Smith,[85] Oates met Charles Gross, a professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, at a dinner party at her home. In early 2009, Oates and Gross were married.[86][87] On April 13, 2019, Oates announced via Twitter that Gross had died at the age of 83.[88] As a diarist, Oates began keeping a detailed journal in 1973, documenting her personal and literary life; it eventually grew to "more than 4,000 single-spaced typewritten pages".[89] In 2008, Oates said she had "moved away from keeping a formal journal" and instead preserved copies of her e-mails.[83] As of 1999, Oates remained devoted to running, of which she has written, "Ideally, the runner who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting".[90] While running, Oates mentally envisions scenes in her novels and works out structural problems in already-written drafts; she formulated the germ of her novel You Must Remember This (1987) while running, when she "glanced up and saw the ruins of a railroad bridge", which reminded her of "a mythical upstate New York city in the right place".[90] Oates was a member of the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1997 to 2016.[91] She is an honorary member of the Simpson Literary Project, which annual awards the $50,000 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize to a mid-career writer. She has served as the Project's artist-in-residence several times.[92]

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