Joyce Carol Oates is this month’s Author Spotlight.
Many people had never heard of Joyce Carol Oates until Oprah selected We Were the Mulvaneys for her book club in 2001, but Oates has actually been writing since the 1960s.
“Joyce Carol Oates is many things to many readers: moralist, social chronicler, psychologist, ironist, genius, but above all, she is a wonderful storyteller,” says Novelist. “Whether her chosen milieu is a gothic landscape, the mind of a troubled serial murderer, or a family torn by events, she pulls readers into her rich tales and provides a unique perspective and gripping story in addition to incisive social commentary and psychological insight.”
Oates’ grandmother got her started in writing by giving her a copy of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and, later, her first typewriter.
This prolific Princeton professor has written:
- 36 novels
- 11 novels under pseudonyms
- 8 novellas
- 30 short story collections
- 8 volumes of drama
- 11 books of essays and criticism
- 9 books of poetry
- 5 young adult novels
- 2 children’s books
Critical Survey says, “Oates's significance as a writer stems from her willingness to take risks and from her pledge to carry on testing the limits of fiction, exploring different genres, and using different types of character, setting and social milieu. She has refused to adjust herself to any literary school or aesthetic category.”
Frequent themes include relationships, social issues like poverty or the environment, and the effects of violence and victimization.
Oates’ friend, fellow writer Edmund White, says,
“All this emphasis on productivity and versatility can obscure the dimension of her extraordinary gift as a novelist. Although she has written many novels about prosperous people, starting with Expensive People and including the recent Middle Age: A Romance, her real loyalty is to the embattled working class. She was born and brought up in a working family in upstate New York. In a short, very moving piece in The New Yorker not long ago, she wrote about the $250 a year scholarship she received to Syracuse University, which gave her access to the world of books and learning. She has never forgotten how precarious all fortunes are in America, which is the subject of her masterpiece, We Were the Mulvaneys, a saga about the rise and fall of a family. The financial losses of the family in The Falls are paralleled by the destruction of the environment--personal riches and natural riches are all depleted.”
Awards won by Oates include the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year, Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, and the National Book Award. She has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice and is cited by critics as a probable future Nobel Prizer winner.
Joyce Carol Oates’ books are ideal for book discussion groups. Click
here to see all of Oates’ works at LVDL.