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| Name: | Joyce Carol Oates | |||
| Birth: | June 16 1938 | |||
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Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Raised in rural, working-class New York, Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novel Them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. With a reputation for prolificness, Oates is one of the leading American novelists since the 1960s.
As of 2008, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978.
Oates has also written under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly."
Style and Themes
From her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964, up to Kindred Passions in 1987, Oates built up a literary corpus that mixes Gothic estrangement with high social observation. Her works contain the typical elements of this type of tale: unconscious forces, seduction, incest, violence, and rape, sometimes to the point of sensationalism. She has written in a variety of genres, eras and landscapes—thus, she has works settled in a Faulkner-like Eden County, an imaginary area of upstate New York; in academia; in the Detroit slums and the Pennsylvania backwoods. But her works are not mere renderings of unusual experiences in far away places, both in space and time: novels such as A Bloodsmoor Romance, The Mysteries of Wintherthurn and Kindred Passions contain strong feminist overtones and use of the Gothic device to explore the ambiguities of gender and the sexual bases of fantasy.
