Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates (Born 1938) is an American writer. Her works include A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), them (1969), Bellefleur (1980), On Boxing (1987), You Must Remember This (1988), American Appetites (1989), and Black Water (1992). She won a National Book Award for them.^[1]

Life and Works[edit]

Oates was born June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York.^[2] She enjoyed telling dark stories from an early age, and was rejected by a publisher at age 15 for her first novel, about a drug dealer's rehab.^[3] She attended Syracuse University and published her first book, a short story collection called By the North Gate, in 1963.^[4] Since then, she has been very prolific as a volume writer and writers profane and explicit works.^[5] She wrote many, many novels, including A Garden of Earthly Delights, them, 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), and The Man Without a Shadow (2016).^[6]

In her later works, she focused on race and violence, as in Black Water.^[7] Her most recent novel, A Book of American Martyrs (1999), begins with the murder of an abortion doctor by a man calling himself a soldier of Christ.^[8]

See also[edit]

• James Joyce

References[edit]