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 her short story collection 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 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. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
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, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She grew up on her parents' farm outside the town. Her brother, Fred Jr., and sister, Lynn Ann, were born in 1943 and 1956, respectively. Lynn Ann has autism and is institutionalized, and (as of 2015) Oates has not seen her since 1971. Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York. She 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 widowed paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside (née Morningstar), lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce. After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that Blanche's father had killed himself. She also found out that Blanche was Jewish who hid her identity in order to escape persecution and chose not to disclose this to Oates. Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007). Violence marred the lives of Oates and her recent ancestors: Oates' mother's biological father was murdered in 1917, which led to Oates' mother's informal adoption. At age fourteen, Oates' paternal grandmother Blanche survived an attempted murder-suicide at the hands of her own father. He did kill himself. When Oates was a child, her next-door neighbor pleaded guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica Correctional Facility. Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child. 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!" 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". Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter. Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper. She was the first in her family to complete high school. As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.
University Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined the Phi Mu fraternity for women. She 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". 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". At the age of 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960, 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. 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.
Career In 1964, the Vanguard Press published Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall, 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". The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson". It has been anthologized many times and adapted as a 1985 film, Smooth Talk, which starred Laura Dern. In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
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