Joyce Carol Oates Bibliography

                      Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She grew up on her parents’ farm, outside the town, and went to the same one-room schoolhouse her mother had attended. This rural area of upstate New York, straddling Niagara and Erie Counties, had been hit hard by the Great Depression. The few industries the area enjoyed suffered frequent closures and layoffs. Farm families worked desperately hard to sustain meager subsistence. But young Joyce enjoyed the natural environment of farm country, and displayed a precocious interest in books and writing. Although her parents had little education, they encouraged her ambitions. When, at age 14, her grandmother provided her with her first typewriter, she began consciously preparing herself, “writing novel after novel” throughout high school and college.

Joyce Carol Oates  is one of the United States most prolific and versatile contemporary writers.In 1953, at age fifteen, Oates wrote her first novel.Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde.

When she transferred to the high school in Lockport, she quickly distinguished herself. An excellent student, she contributed to her high school newspaper and won a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she majored in English.  After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she earned her master’s in a single year at the University of Wisconsin. While studying in Wisconsin she met Raymond Smith. In 1961 they got married.

In 1968, Joyce took a job at the University of Windsor, and the couple moved across the Detroit River to Windsor, in the Canadian province of Ontario. In the ten years that followed, Joyce Carol Oates published new books. Many of her novels sold well; her short stories and critical essays solidified her reputation. Oates had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States though only in her thirties.

after 1978, when they moved to Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1978, Joyce Carol Oates has taught in the creative writing program at Princeton University, where she has mentored numerous young writers, including Jonathan Safran Foer. March 2010 President Barack Obama awarded the National Humanities Medal at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House to Joyce Carol Oates for a lifetime of contributions to American literature as author of 50 novels.

Her husband, Raymond Smith, died in 2008, shortly before the publication of her 32nd collection of short stories. The following year, Oates married Professor Charles Gross, of the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton.