Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938, Lockport, New York, U.S.) is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist noted for her vast literary output in a variety of styles and genres. Particularly effective are her depictions of violence and evil in modern society. Her books include them (1969; winner of a National Book Award) and Blonde (2000), a fictionalized biography of actress Marilyn Monroe.

Oates’s novels also encompass a wide range of historical settings. She typically portrays American individuals whose intensely experienced and obsessive lives end in bloodshed and self-destruction owing to larger forces beyond their control. Her books blend a realistic treatment of everyday life with horrific and even sensational depictions of violence.

Early life and influences

Oates was born in New York state, the daughter of Frederic Oates, a tool-and-die designer, and Carolina (Bush) Oates, a homemaker. Her interest in writing and literature was nurtured by her paternal grandmother, who gave Oates her first typewriter and a copy of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In 2015 Oates told NPR about the book’s influence on her: “I basically memorized it.…I did have other books but this is the one the really, really stimulated my imagination.”

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Oates had a happy childhood, but her family had been touched by violence and tragedy, including the murder of her maternal grandfather. She told NPR, “I’ve sometimes been criticized for the violence in my writing but it was really not that unusual in my background. I wasn’t imagining or inventing any of these things.”

Education and teaching career

Oates studied English at Syracuse University (B.A., 1960) and the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1961). She taught English at the University of Detroit from 1961 to 1967 and at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, from 1967 to 1978. From 1978 she taught at Princeton University. In 1961 she married Raymond J. Smith (died 2008), a fellow English student who himself became a professor and an editor. With him she published The Ontario Review, a literary magazine.

First publications

Early in her career Oates contributed short stories to a number of magazines and reviews, including the Prairie Schooner, Literary Review, Southwest Review, and Epoch, and in 1963 she published her first collection of short stories, By the North Gate. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, appeared in 1964 and was followed by a second short-story collection, Upon the Sweeping Flood (1965). She wrote prolifically thereafter, averaging about two books per year.

Novels and short stories

Her notable fiction works include the series the Wonderland Quartet, comprising four novels that examine social class and race in America: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), them, and Wonderland (1971). Oates also published the novels Do with Me What You Will (1973), Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), Zombie (1995), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), Broke Heart Blues (1999), The Falls (2004), My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008), Mudwoman (2012), Daddy Love (2013), Carthage (2014), Jack of Spades (2015), The Man Without a Shadow (2016), and Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. (2020).

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Her forays into young adult fiction include Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002) and Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You (2012). In 2025 she published Fox, a suspense novel about a predatory teacher at a boarding school who uses charm and manipulation to cover up his abuse of his students. The New York Times wrote of the novel, “The attention given to the perspectives of [the title character’s] victims can be seen as a rejoinder to Humbert Humbert’s narrative monopoly in [Vladimir Nabokov’s novel] ‘Lolita.’ ”

Several of Oates’s works have been shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize, including the novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde and the short-story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep (2014). In 2020 literary critic Elaine Showalter called Blonde Oates’s “most ambitious novel.” Oates herself told Time magazine that while writing the book, Monroe represented for her “my Moby Dick, the powerful galvanizing image about which an epic might be constructed, with myriad levels of meaning and significance.” In 2022 Blonde was adapted into a controversial film by Australian director Andrew Dominik, with Ana de Armas playing Monroe.

Oates’s other short-story collections include Faithless: Tales of Transgression, “richly various” tales of sin. An extensive and mainly retrospective volume of her stories, High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006, was released in 2006. Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (2008) features fictionalized accounts of the final days of various iconic American writers. The stories in Black Dahlia and White Rose (2012) are threaded with menace and violence; the title piece is a fictionalization of the sensational 1947 Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles. Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong (2014) features tales that explore the sinister possibilities of romantic entanglement. In the collection The (Other) You (2021), the stories’ characters contemplate regret and missed opportunities.

(Read Britannica’s article “America’s 5 Most Notorious Cold Cases.”)

Mysteries and memoirs

Oates also wrote mysteries (under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly), plays, essays, poetry, and literary criticism. Essays, reviews, and other prose pieces are included in Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (1999) and In Rough Country (2010). In 2011 Oates published the memoir A Widow’s Story, in which she mourned her husband’s death. The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (2015) is a memoir elliptically documenting her childhood.