Joyce Carol Oates

www.ReaAward.org

References

Ontario Review Press

A Joyce Carol Oates homepage at The University of San Francisco

New York Times special on Joyce Carol Oates

A brief biography of Joyce Carol Oates

Bookpage's interview with Joyce Carol Oates

Yale Daily News article on Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. Growing up in the rural New York state town, she attended a one-room schoolhouse. She was given her first typewriter at age fourteen, and began writing. She studied at Syracuse University, where she won a writing contest for Mademoiselle magazine. She received her Masters degree from the University of Wisconsin, where she met her husband, Raymond Smith. In 1962, the couple moved to Detroit, the scene of her novel them, as well as a number of short stories. "Detroit, my 'great' subject," she has written, "made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am-for better or worse." Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada. In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey. She and her husband also operate a small press and publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.

One of America's most prolific writers, Oates has written 24 novels and 19 collections of short stories as well as essays, poems and plays. Oates has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Lorus Club. She received a National Book Award in 1970 for the novel them. Her stories been included in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection and she is the recipient of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and. Letters. In a 1975 interview with the New York Times, she commented, "I have always lived a very conventional life of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic, no need, even, to organize my time." When a reporter labeled her a "workaholic," she replied, "I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. 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."

"All of my writing," she once said, "is about the mystery of human emotions." John Updike once commented on her achievements thus: "If the phrase 'woman of letters' existed, she would be foremost, in this county, entitled to it."

Joyce Carol Oates is married and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. A new collection of short stories, Faithless, was published in 2001.

In selecting the 1990 winner, Rea Award jurors Frank Conroy, Daniel Halpern and Tobias Wolff noted:

"One of the magical things about Joyce Carol Oates is her ability to constantly reinvent not only the psychological space she inhabits, but herself as well, as part of her fiction. She can operate, as a writer, out of a combination of bewilderment and immediate, intuitive understanding - turning to fiction what impinges on her life, wherever she chooses to live it."


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