Biography of Joyce Carol Oates
Short notes about her life:
- Born in Lockport, NY June 16, 1938 on her parents’ farm in an area hit hard by the Great Depression
- She grew up surrounded by many layoffs, she grew up in a time after the Great Depression.
- She enjoyed the natural environment and showed an interest in books and writing
- Her parents supported her ambitions and her grandmother gave her a typewriter when she was 14
- Both her parents were very hardworking, although they did not earn a high school degree
- She was an excellent student who participated in the school newspaper and graduated as valedictorian
- She won a scholarship to Syracuse University graduated with a degree in English
- She went on to get her Masters at the University of Wisconsin in one year
- While in attendance of the University of Wisconsin, she met Raymond Smith, who she would later marry
- Oates lived in Detroit, Michigan with her husband where she taught at the University of Detroit. Here, she was exposed to the social turmoil in American cities
- After working at the University of Detroit, she then got a job at the University of Windsor and began publishing many books (2-3 per year)
- She started The Ontario Review with her husband which continued even after they moved to Princeton, New Jersey where she began teaching
- She received the PEN/Malamud Award for “a lifetime of literary achievement”
- Her husband died in 2008 and a year later she married Professor Charles Gross who worked at Princeton
- Before she met Gross, she became depressed and had suicidal thoughts
- Oates lives a very internal and solitary life. She is not drawn to external things. One of her favorite things to do is to go running with her husband
- She loves nature; that is where she feels peace
- Oates loves to teach and feels like that is where she really belongs
- She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University
LIterary Career
Short notes about her literary career:
- Oates started writing when she was very young, but never really thought as a kid that she would grow up to be a famous writer
- Oates was fascinated with what her parents and grand-parents generation and what they had to live through (Great Depression with many Lay-offs)
- The first thing she wanted to write about was animals and the farm, because she grew up on the farm
- Oates was around the age of 14-15 when she began to realize she wanted to become a writer.
- A book that made a large impression on Oates: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
- Oates does a lot of research: for shorter books she will do the research after, because it’s too distracting, but for longer novels she does the research simultaneously with the writing.
- Oates had her first book, With Shuddering Fall (1964), published at the age of 26.
- She published her well-known short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” two years later.
- The second novel she published was titled A Garden of Earthly Delights.
- This and three other books formed what is called the “Wonderland Quartet.”
- While these four were all finalists for the National Book Award, it was Oates’s novel Them that won her the National Book Award in 1970.
- Her book Blonde was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
- Many of her novels are based on real life incidents that happened to people with whom she was close.
- Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys also garnered recognition for her after it was selected to be on the reading list for Oprah’s Book Club in 2001.
- Oates considers herself an idealist
- The collected poems of Emily Dickinson- inspired her in her adult years
- She has written more than 56 novels, 30 short story collections, 8 volumes of poetry, and many other works
- “I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.”-Joyce Carol Oates
Personal Life
- Oates married Raymond J. Smith, another grad student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1961.
- They started their own literary magazine together called The Ontario Review.
- The two also started an independent book publisher, Ontario Review Books.
- Raymond died unexpectedly from pneumonia in 2008.
- After months of depression due to her husband’s sudden death, Oates married Professor Charles Gross, of Princeton in 2009.
- Oates kept a journal for a while, but then started saving her email as an informal journal of sorts.
Q & A with Life Style
When were you happiest?
“On two dates: 23 January 1961 and 13 March 2009 (my two weddings).”
What is your greatest fear?
“What we all fear – the loss of meaning and significance in our lives.”
What is your earliest memory?
“Feverish with measles, I lay in bed helpless, seeing my young, anxious parents hovering over me. I might have been four at the time.”
What was your most embarrassing moment?
“This, I fear, is yet to come.”
What is your most treasured possession?
“My marriage.”
What would your super power be?
“Super power! I was not aware that I had even an ordinary power.”
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
“The impression I have always given of being shy, withdrawn.”
What is your favorite smell?
“Lilac.”
What is your favorite word?
“Nocturne.”
What is your favorite book?
“The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
“A beautiful Fortuny gown.”
What is your guiltiest pleasure?
“Staring out the window – wasting time
What do you owe your parents?
“Everything!”
What or who is the greatest love of your life?
“I have had two great loves – my first husband Raymond Smith (who died in February 2008) and my new husband Charles Gross (to whom I was married in March 2009).”
What does love feel like?
“Love is an indescribable sensation – perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.”
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“If I knew, I would not overuse them!”
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
“A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time. For instance, my young husband Raymond and I endured a hellish nine months in Beaumont, Texas when we were first married, but during that time, in a kind of exile from civilization, I managed to complete much of my first published novel.”
If you could go back in time, where would you go?
“To an idyllic day spent with my parents and my grandmother, Blanche Woodside, in the long-ago time when I was a young girl and my parents were living in the country in a place I visit now only in dreams.”
When did you last cry, and why?
“Since my husband Raymond died, I cry frequently. Before that, rarely.”
What song would you like played at your funeral?
“I would not want a song but perhaps a Nocturne of Chopin.”
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
“I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.”
“On two dates: 23 January 1961 and 13 March 2009 (my two weddings).”
What is your greatest fear?
“What we all fear – the loss of meaning and significance in our lives.”
What is your earliest memory?
“Feverish with measles, I lay in bed helpless, seeing my young, anxious parents hovering over me. I might have been four at the time.”
What was your most embarrassing moment?
“This, I fear, is yet to come.”
What is your most treasured possession?
“My marriage.”
What would your super power be?
“Super power! I was not aware that I had even an ordinary power.”
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
“The impression I have always given of being shy, withdrawn.”
What is your favorite smell?
“Lilac.”
What is your favorite word?
“Nocturne.”
What is your favorite book?
“The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”
What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?
“A beautiful Fortuny gown.”
What is your guiltiest pleasure?
“Staring out the window – wasting time
What do you owe your parents?
“Everything!”
What or who is the greatest love of your life?
“I have had two great loves – my first husband Raymond Smith (who died in February 2008) and my new husband Charles Gross (to whom I was married in March 2009).”
What does love feel like?
“Love is an indescribable sensation – perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.”
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“If I knew, I would not overuse them!”
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
“A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time. For instance, my young husband Raymond and I endured a hellish nine months in Beaumont, Texas when we were first married, but during that time, in a kind of exile from civilization, I managed to complete much of my first published novel.”
If you could go back in time, where would you go?
“To an idyllic day spent with my parents and my grandmother, Blanche Woodside, in the long-ago time when I was a young girl and my parents were living in the country in a place I visit now only in dreams.”
When did you last cry, and why?
“Since my husband Raymond died, I cry frequently. Before that, rarely.”
What song would you like played at your funeral?
“I would not want a song but perhaps a Nocturne of Chopin.”
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
“I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.”