Oates << ohts, >>, Joyce Carol (1938-…), is one of the most productive authors in American literature. During a writing career of more than 50 years, Oates has produced over 150 books, including about 50 novels and short novels and more than 40 collections of short stories. She has also published collections of poetry and plays, and books of essays on literary and social criticism and popular culture. In addition, she has written books for children and young adults and edited many volumes of stories and nonfiction.
Oates’s fiction includes realistic stories, horror stories, historical romances, and suspense and psychological crime stories. Oates described herself as “a chronicler of the American experience.” She sets much of her fiction among various social classes in both urban and rural America. Much of her fiction deals with violence, sex, mental illness, and race.
Oates gained recognition with her early trilogy of novels, consisting of A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969). Her other novels include Cybele (1979); Bellefleur (1980); A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982); Marya, A Life (1986); Black Water (1992); We Were the Mulvaneys (1996); Blonde (2000); Beasts (2002); The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007); Carthage (2014); Hazards of Time Travel (2018); Pursuit (2019); Breathe (2021); Babysitter (2022); and 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister (2023).
Oates’s short stories have been published in several collections. Such books include Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been? Selected Early Stories (1994); High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories, 1966-2006 (2007); Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense (2018); and Zero-Sum (2023).
Oates’s poetry collections include The Time Traveler (1989) and Tenderness (1996). Among her collections of plays are Twelve Plays (1991) and New Plays (1998). Her essays appear in The Profane Art (1983), Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (1999), and The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (2003). She published The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982 in 2007. Her memoir The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age was published in 2015.
Oates has written the picture books Come Meet Muffin! (1998), Where Is Little Reynard? (2003), and Naughty Cherie (2008). For young adults, she has written Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002), Small Avalanches and Other Stories (2003), and After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (2006).
Oates was born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York. She received a B.A. degree from Syracuse University in 1960 and an M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada from 1967 to 1978. She was writer-in-residence at Princeton University from 1978 to 1981 and became a professor of humanities at Princeton in 1987. Oates also has written thrillers under the names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.
