Joyce Carol Oates

Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the National Book Award, the Rae Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction four times. She is the author of dozens of books, including Blonde (Ecco, 2000), We Were the Mulvaneys (Dutton, 1996), Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Dutton, 1990), You Must Remember This (Dutton, 1987), and them (Vanguard Press, 1969). Oates has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

See Work

Winter 1988

Foster Home

By Joyce Carol Oates

When we first saw Mary Miles, I will say that our hearts went out to her—you always seem to know, in the very first instant, when a person, particularly a child, is going to mean something special to you. Not that Mary Miles was a child...

FICTION / Winter 1980

The Birthday Celebration

By Joyce Carol Oates

he day Yolande ran away from home, never to return— never to return to Bellefleur Manor—was also the day of Germaine’s first birthday. But was there any connection between the two events. . . .?

CRITICISM / Summer 1997

The Stone Well

By Joyce Carol Oates

Six feet from the rim the old vertigo begins.
In the tall grass flattened and gone to seed.
In the white glare of the October sun.

CRITICISM / Summer 1984

The Masquers

By Joyce Carol Oates

I am lying, you say hesitantly, tasting
the thin syllables, gauging their feathery weight
in the air: chill fine whining notes.

 

ESSAYS / Winter 1985

Romance and Anti-Romance: From Bronte’s Jane Eyre to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

By Joyce Carol Oates

Jean Rhys’s haunting and hallucinatory prose poem of a novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), boldly tells the story— authentic, intimate, and unsparing, because first-person confession—of Mrs. Bertha Rochester, the doomed madwoman of Charlotte...

POETRY / Autumn 1981

Boredom

By Joyce Carol Oates

There drifts the sky again,
Here, a single thought crawls slow as a flea.