Joyce Carol Oates facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Joyce Carol Oates
|
|
|---|---|
Oates in 2014
|
|
| Born | June 16, 1938 Lockport, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | |
| Education | Syracuse University (BA) University of Wisconsin, Madison (MA) Rice University |
| Period | 1963–present |
| Notable works | A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967); Them (1969); The Wheel of Love (1970); Wonderland (1971); Black Water (1992); Blonde (2000); High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006) |
| Notable awards | O. Henry Award (1967) National Book Award (1970) O. Henry Award (1973) National Humanities Medal (2010) Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement (2012) Jerusalem Prize (2019) |
| Spouses |
|
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is a famous American writer. She has written in many different styles, including novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. Since her first book was published in 1963, she has written over 58 novels and many other works.
Some of her most famous books, like Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, a very important award in writing. She won the National Book Award for her novel Them (1969) and has received many other honors, including the National Humanities Medal.
Besides writing, Oates was a professor at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and now teaches at Rutgers University. In 2016, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society, an organization for people who have made great achievements in science and the arts.
Contents
Early Life and Schooling
Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She was the oldest of three children. Her family lived on a farm, and she grew up in the working-class community of Millersport, New York. She described her family as "happy" and "close-knit." Her grandmother, Blanche, lived with the family and was very close to Joyce.
Oates went to a small one-room school, just like her mother did. She loved reading from a young age. A special gift from her grandmother was the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Oates said it was "the great treasure of my childhood" and the book that influenced her the most. As a teenager, she read famous authors like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau.
When she was 14, her grandmother gave her a typewriter, and she started writing stories. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. She even won a writing award from Scholastic while she was still a student.
University and First Book
Oates won a scholarship to go to Syracuse University. She said it was a "very exciting place" and she practiced her writing by finishing novels and then throwing them away to start new ones. At age 19, she won a college short story contest in Mademoiselle magazine. She graduated as the valedictorian (the student with the highest grades) in 1960.
She then earned a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Soon after, she met Evelyn Shrifte, the president of a publishing company called Vanguard Press. Shrifte thought Oates was a "genius" and published her first book, a collection of short stories called By the North Gate, in 1963.
A Career in Writing
.jpg)
Oates published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964 when she was 26. One of her most famous early short stories is "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1966). She dedicated it to the singer Bob Dylan. The story was inspired by a real-life crime and was later made into a movie called Smooth Talk.
Her novel them (1969) won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970. The story is set in Detroit and explores difficult topics like crime and social conflicts. Oates often based her stories on real events and people she knew. Since then, she has published about two books every year. Her stories often explore topics like poverty, social challenges, and the lives of young women.
In the 1980s, Oates started writing horror and Gothic stories. She said she was inspired by writers like Franz Kafka and James Joyce. In 1996, she published We Were the Mulvaneys, which became a bestseller after it was chosen for Oprah's Book Club.
For many years, people have thought that Oates might win the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the highest honors a writer can receive.
Teaching and Inspiring Others
Oates began her teaching career in Texas and later taught at the University of Detroit. In 1968, she moved to Canada and taught at the University of Windsor. She started teaching at Princeton University in 1978 and stayed there for many years.
She was a big influence on many of her students, including the writer Jonathan Safran Foer. He took her writing class at Princeton and said she was "the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way." Oates was the advisor for his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated.
Oates retired from Princeton in 2014 but continues to teach creative writing at other universities, including UC Berkeley.
Personal Life
In 1961, Oates married Raymond J. Smith, whom she met in graduate school. He was also a professor and they worked together on a literary magazine called The Ontario Review. Oates described their relationship as a "marriage of like minds." Smith passed away in 2008.
In 2009, Oates married Charles Gross, a professor at Princeton. He passed away in 2019.
Oates is known for being very productive. She writes for several hours every day in longhand. Some critics have joked about how many books she has written, but Oates says she simply has many stories to tell. To stay active, she enjoys running. She has said that while running, she often thinks about scenes for her novels.
Awards and Honors
Joyce Carol Oates has won dozens of awards for her writing. Here are some of the most important ones:
- 1967 & 1973: O. Henry Award for short stories
- 1970: National Book Award for Fiction for her novel them
- 1990: Rea Award for the Short Story
- 1996: PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short stories
- 2010: National Humanities Medal, presented by the U.S. President
- 2019: Jerusalem Prize for her lifetime of work
- 2020: Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, a major international prize
She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction four times.
See also
In Spanish: Joyce Carol Oates para niños
