Joyce Carol Oates - A Garden of Earthly Delights

Joyce Carol Oates, one of America's most versatile and prolific contemporary writers, was born in the small town of Lockport, New York, on June 16, 1938. She grew up on a farm in nearby Erie County and began writing stories while still in elementary school. As a teenager she devoured works by Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, Hemingway, and the Bronts, and soon moved on to D. H. Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka. Oates graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Syracuse University in 1960 and was awarded an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. During the 1960s and 1970s she taught English at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. In 1974 she cofounded the Ontario Review with her husband, Raymond Smith. Oates was named a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1978, the same year she became writer-in-residence at Princeton University, where she is currently the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

Oates's first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), the story of a destructive romance between a teenage girl and a thirty-year-old race car driver, foreshadowed her preoccupation with violence and darkness. Her next novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), is the opening volume in a trilogy about different socioeconomic groups in America that incorporates Expensive People (1968) and them (1969), for which she won the National Book Award. Throughout the 1970s Oates pursued her exploration of American people and institutions in a series of novels that fuse social analysis with vivid psychological portrayals. Wonderland (1971) exposes the shortcomings of the medical world; Do With Me What You Will (1973) centers on the legal profession; The Assassins (1975) attacks political corruption; Son of the Morning (1978) tracks the rise and fall of a religious zealot; and Unholy Loves (1979) looks at pettiness and hypocrisy within the academic community. Like the most important modern writers Joyce, Proust, MannOates has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history, noted Newsweek. Novels such as Childwold (1976) and Cybele (1979) showcase what Alfred Kazin called her sweetly brutal sense of what American experience is really like.

Joyce Carol Oates is a fearless writer [with] impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers, noted the Los Angeles Times Book Review. During this same period she secured her reputation as a virtuoso of the short story with eight acclaimed collections: By the North Gate (1963), Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966), The Wheel of Love (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), The Goddess and Other Women (1974), The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975), Crossing the Border (1976), Night-Side (1977). In the landscape of the contemporary American short story Miss Oates stands out as a master, occupying a preeminent category of her own, said the Saturday Review. [Oates] intuitively seems to know that the short story is for a different type of material from the novel: a brief and dazzling plunge into another state of consciousness, remarked Erica Jong. Miss Oates [is] our poet laureate of schizophrenia, of blasted childhoods, of random acts of violence. Her stories have been widely anthologized, and she is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Continuing Achievement Award as well as the recipient of the PEN/ Malamud Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Short Story.