Literary Giants - Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is an American author who was raised in rural New York. Her novels numbering over 50 have won many awards and prizes in the literary world. These include “Black Water”, “Them” and “What I Lived For.” Since the 1960’s Oates has been one of the leading American novelists, with a reputation for being a very prolific novelist.

Joyce Carol Oates was the first in her family to complete high school and went on to attend Syracuse University. While at college she won a college short story contest that was sponsored by “Mademoiselle” magazine, and states that she trained herself as a writer by writing novel after novel, and throwing them out when she finished them.
Joyce graduated Syracuse as valedictorian and went onto obtain her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin.

Oates’ first novel “With Shuddering Fall was published when she was 26 years old, since then she has published an average of 2 books per year. Joyce Carol Oates often writes about rural poverty, class tensions, power, sexual abuse, female adolescence and sometimes the supernatural. Violence is a constant in all of her work, which led to Oates writing an essay to respond to the question "Why is Your Writing So Violent”. Her novel “We Were the Mulvaneys” was chosen by Oprah’s Book Club in 2001 and also turned into a Lifetime Movie. Oates has also written several mystery novels under the pen names of Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Besides being a novelist Joyce Carol Oates has also been a wife, a widow, and a professor at Princeton University. Joyce is a devoted runner who uses the time that she is running to envision scenes for her novels. Oates actually writes all of her novels in longhand, she works from 8a.m. until 1p.m. each day, then for a few hours in the evening. The prolific work of Joyce Carol Oates has become one of her best known attributes; critics have criticized her for producing so many novels. Yet, she states that she works hard, the hours roll by and she seems to create more than she anticipates, but she has more stories to tell and more novels to write.