Joyce Carol Oates (b.1938,) pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. This author of over 100 books, various styles, and genres, and a five-time Pulitzer finalist is noted for her depictions of violence and evil in modern society.
Born in Millersport, New York, and educated at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin, Oates taught at the University of Detroit, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, Princeton, and University of California, Berkeley. A prolific fiction writer and essayist, she published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964, followed by the short-story collection, Upon the Sweeping Flood (1965.)
Violent and impressive in its social scope, her fiction challenges received ideas about the nature of human experience. Them (1969,) her fourth novel, won a National Book Award. Later novels include Marya: A Life (1986,) You Must Remember This (1989,) What I Lived For (l994,) Blonde (2000; about Marilyn Monroe,) and Black Girl, White Girl (2006.)
A biography of Oates is Greg Johnson’s Invisible Writer (1998.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Joyce Carol Oates
When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Age, Aging
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Ancestors, Ancestry
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Criticism
Nothing is accidental in the universe—this is one of my Laws of Physics—except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: The Universe, Universe
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Writers
It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Women
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Luck, Fortune
When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Reality
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Food
In love there are two things—bodies and words.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Love
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Celebration
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
—Joyce Carol Oates
The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?
—Joyce Carol Oates
Topics: Television
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