Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (1938 - ) is an American writer. Her most well known works include Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, The Falls, and A Garden of Earthly Delights. Oates has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award (1970).
- Joyce Carol Oates: BiographyThe prolific Joyce Carol Oates is an acclaimed writer known for novels like 'A Garden of Earthly Delights,' 'The Falls' and 'Them,' which won the National Book Award.
- Joyce Carol Oates: BritannicaJoyce Carol Oates, pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, (born June 16, 1938, Lockport, New York, U.S.), American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist noted for her vast literary output in a variety of styles and genres. Particularly effective are her depictions of violence and evil in modern society.
- Joyce Carol Oates: Poetry FoundationNovelist, essayist, and poet Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She earned a BA from Syracuse University, where she graduated valedictorian, and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Research & Reference
- Archive of Recorded Poetry and LiteratureListen to audio-recorded readings of former Consultants in Poetry Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Frost; Nobel Laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Czeslaw Milosz, and renowned writers such as Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and Kurt Vonnegut read from their work at the Library of Congress.
- Joyce Carol Oates: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Joyce Carol Oates. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Joyce Carol Oates Papers: Syracuse UniversityThe papers of the American novelist, playwright, poet, short story writer, and author span 1956-1998 and include correspondence; a journal; typescript and holograph manuscripts for essays, novels, plays, and poems; periodicals; photographs; publicity; and reviews.
Streaming Media
- Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of MindOne of the country’s preeminent writers, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 100 books, including Them, We Were the Mulvaneys, and Blonde. In this candid and revealing documentary, she provides insight into her life, creative process, and the events that have shaped her writings, including the 1967 Detroit Riot, the Chappaquiddick incident, and the tragic life of Marilyn Monroe. Featuring readings by Oscar winner Laura Dern.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Black Water
The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling novel We Were the Mulvaneys "Its power of evocation is remarkable." --The New Yorker In the midst of a long summer on Grayling Island, Maine, twenty-six-year-old Kelly Kelleher longs for something interesting to happen to her--something that will make her finally feel some of what she imagines other people must feel when they watch the fireworks explode off the beach. So when Kelly meets The Senator at an exclusive party and he asks her to go back to a hotel room on the main island with him, she says yes. Even though the senator is old enough to be her father, even though he has perhaps been drinking too heavily to get behind the wheel, the danger of saying yes is an inevitable and even exciting part of the adventure Kelly is finally going to have. However, as The Senator's car whips around the island's roads and eventually crashes through a guardrail, it becomes clear to Kelly and the reader that this man embodies a wholly different and more sinister type of danger, one much larger and harder to contain than the horrible events that unfold as Kelly is left in the sinking car. Black Water is a chilling meditation on power, trust, and violation and a timeless classic from one of America's foremost storytellers.
The Best American Essays of the Century
This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. In her introduction to this volume, Joyce Carol Oates describes her project as "a search for the expression of personal experience within the historical, the individual talent within the tradition." Along with Robert Atwan, who has overseen the acclaimed BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS series since its inception in 1986, Oates has chosen a list of works that are both intimate and important, essays that take on subjects of profound and universal significance while retaining the power and spirit of a personal address. This collection honors some of the twentieth century's best-known and best-loved writers on a breathtaking variety of topics. In a journalistic mode, Ernest Hemingway covers the bullfights in Pamplona, H. L. Mencken reacts to the Scopes trial, and Michael Herr dodges bullets in a helicopter over Vietnam. Nowhere is the intersection of our personal and political histories more meaningful than when the subject is America's enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," and others. The wonders and horrors of science, nature, and the cosmos are explored with eloquence, bravery, and beauty when Lewis Thomas writes about "The Lives of a Cell," Rachel Carson mulls "The Marginal World," and Stephen Jay Gould preaches evolution and baseball in "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown." Taken together, these essays fit, inthe words of Joyce Carol Oates, "into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we've come from, and who we are, and where we are going." Mark Twain * W.E.B. Du Bois * Henry Adams * John Muir * William James * Randolph Bourne * John Jay Chapman * Jane Addams * T. S. Eliot * Ernest Hemingway * H. L. Mencken * Zora Neale Hurston * Edmund Wilson * Gertrude Stein * F. Scott Fitzgerald * James Thurber * Richard Wright * James Agee * Robert Frost * E. B. White * S. J. Perelman * Langston Hughes * Katherine Anne Porter * Mary McCarthy * Rachel Carson * James Baldwin * Loren Eiseley * Eudora Welty * Donald Hall * Martin Luther King, Jr. * Tom Wolfe * Susan Sontag * Vladimir Nabokov * N. Scott Momaday * Elizabeth Hardwick * Michael Herr * Maya Angelou * Lewis Thomas * John McPhee * William H. Gass * Maxine Hong Kingston * Alice Walker * Adrienne Rich * Joan Didion * Richard Rodriguez * Gretel Ehrlich * Annie Dillard * Cynthia Ozick * William Manchester * Edward Hoagland * Stephen Jay Gould * Gerald Early * John Updike * Joyce Carol Oates * Saul Bellow
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories
"How ironic," Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, "that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies."Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? "Isn't the implicit promiseof an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected?"In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by womenand minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," and Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-knownstories as Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in the Cars," a story that reveals a darker side to his humor ("That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy"). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales "TheParadise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," of which Oates says, "Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction." From Flannery O'Connor we find "A Late Encounter With the Enemy," and from John Cheever, "The Death of Justina," one ofCheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including BharatiMukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductoryessay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.
What I Lived For
"At forty-two, Jerome Corcoran - "Corky" to his friends and associates - is by all appearances a successful real estate developer and broker, a city councilman with a promising future in local politics, a genuine ladies' man, and all-around great guy. His big house, fifteen-hundred-dollar suits, and the ridiculously large tips he hands out all over town reassure him that he's put plenty of distance between himself and the family history (which includes a murdered father and raving mad mother) he'd rather forget. Corky may think that his inauspicious beginnings on Irish Hill, one of Union City's shabbier neighborhoods, are now far behind him, but over the course of Memorial Day Weekend 1992, that precious illusion, along with several others, will be completely shattered." "In the long list of Corky's women, only one looms larger for him than his own appetites and self-interest: Thalia, his rebellious, radicalized step-daughter from his failed marriage. It is she who will become the agent of his undoing as a complex drama of corruption, blackmail, and political scandal climaxes in an act of explosive violence."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved