Joyce Carol Oates

Born on 16 June 1938 in Lockport, New York, in rural Erie County, Joyce Carol Oates grew up on her maternal grandparents’ farm in a world she would later describe as shaped by poverty, violence, and the unpredictable rhythms of working-class life. Her grandmother gave her a typewriter when she was fourteen, and she began producing novel after novel in longhand and typescript, a habit of ferocious productivity she has never abandoned. She studied at Syracuse University on a scholarship, won a Mademoiselle fiction contest as an undergraduate, and earned her M.A. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she reportedly discovered a short story of hers in the Best American Short Stories anthology and decided to pursue writing full-time. Her first collection, By the North Gate, appeared in 1963; her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964. Them (1969), a panoramic novel set in Detroit from the Depression through the 1967 riots, won the National Book Award. What followed was an output without parallel in contemporary American letters: over fifty novels and counting, alongside hundreds of short stories, volumes of poetry, plays, essays, and criticism. Her fiction maps the violence beneath the surface of American life , Wonderland (1971), Black Water (1992), Blonde (2000), a reimagining of Marilyn Monroe’s inner life, and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996) among the most admired. She taught at the University of Windsor and then at Princeton from 1978 to 2014. Three of her novels have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and she has been a perennial contender for the Nobel. She once said, “I write to discover what it is I am thinking,” and the relentlessness of that inquiry has produced one of the most formidable bodies of work in American literature.

In March 1966, Oates read a Life magazine profile of Charles Schmid, the Tucson man convicted of murdering three teenage girls, who stuffed his boots with newspaper to seem taller and caked pancake makeup over an artificial mole. She turned the account into fiction, first titling the story Death and the Maiden, then dedicating it to Bob Dylan.