On June 16, 1938, Joyce Carol Oates was born. Oates is a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer; she is both extremely prolific and highly regarded by literary critics, a rare combination.
Oates grew up in suburban Buffalo and attended a one-room schoolhouse throughout elementary school. When she graduated from high school in 1956, she was the first member of her family to do so.
She developed a love for reading early and remembers her paternal grandmother as being influential in her love of books. She describes her grandmother’s gift of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as “the most profound literary influence of my life.” Oates fictionalized elements of her grandmother’s life in her 2007 novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter.
Oates attended Syracuse University on an academic scholarship and was the valedictorian of the 1961 graduating class. She went on to receive a Master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and was studying for her Ph.D. at Rice when she left school to become a full-time writer.
Her first book of short stories was published in 1963, and her first novel in 1964. They were only mildly successful, but greater success came quickly. Her 1966 story “In the Region of Ice” won the O. Henry Award. Oates’s next four novels—A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, Them, and Wonderland, collectively known as the “Wonderland quartet,” were all nominated for the National Book Award, and Them won the award.
Oates says that she maintains a strict writing schedule of 8 to 1 every day, with a few more hours in the evening. That schedule has allowed her to be unusually prolific; she’s written more than 70 novels, 40 collections of short stories, 10 volumes of poetry, and several volumes of essays and memoir. And that’s only the writing for adults; there are several novels for children and teens, too.
The volume of her output is sometimes mentioned by reviewers in a disparaging tone as if to suggest that anyone who writes that many books couldn’t be writing very good ones. Oates has written on that criticism, “I work hard, and long, and as the hours roll by I seem to create more…than the literary world allows for a ‘serious’ writer. Yet I have more stories to tell and more novels.”
Such a large body of work can be daunting for the newcomer. In 2003, Oates herself listed two books as her favorite of her own work—Them (1969), a novel about a working-class Detroit family struggling to rise out of poverty, and Blonde (2000), about the life of Marilyn Monroe. Oates has been insistent that this is intended to be a novel, not a biography).
One approach to entering Oates’s body of work is to begin with the award winners. She’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction five times. We’ve already mentioned Blonde. The others are the 1970 story collection The Wheel of Love; the 1992 novella Black Water, a fictional retelling of the Chappaquiddick accident, in which a young woman drowned while a passenger in the car of Senator Edward Kennedy; the 1994 novel What I Lived For, in which a rising politician finds his life in collapse over Memorial Day weekend; and the 2014 story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep. And Oates has won three Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers of America; 1995’s Zombie, which is about a serial killer, not a zombie, won the Stoker for Best Novel, and she’s twice won the award for Best Collection, for 2011’s The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares and 2012’s Black Dahlia and White Rose.
In addition to her fiction, Oates has written several books of literary criticism, essays, and memoir. Perhaps the most unexpected of these books is her 1987 collection of essays On Boxing, an appreciation of that sport.
Much more of Oates’s writing is available at OverDrive.
Also This Week
June 15, 1667
French physician Jean-Baptiste Denys administered the first transfusion of blood into a human being, giving about 12 ounces of sheep’s blood to a 15-year-old boy. The boy survived, probably because the amount of blood was too small to trigger a serious immune response. Denys was not so lucky with another transfusion later this year and wound up on trial for murder when his patient died. Holly Tucker tells the story of that murder trial in Blood Work.
June 17, 1950
Lee Tamahori was born. The director began his career in New Zealand television. His first feature film, 1994’s Once Were Warriors, is a critically praised drama about a Maori family trapped in cycles of alcoholism and domestic abuse. His Hollywood career includes XXX: State of the Union, an action film with Ice Cube and Samuel L. Jackson as top-secret government agents; and Next, a science fiction thriller with Nicolas Cage as a man who can see two minutes into the future.
June 19 1950
Ann Wilson was born. Ann and her sister Nancy are the leaders of the rock band Heart. The band had its first success in the mid-1970s when their style bordered on metal. Heart was even more successful in the mid-1980s when they became queens of the power ballad; “These Dreams” and “Alone” were both #1 hits. Several of Heart’s albums are available for streaming at Hoopla.
June 20, 1974
The movie Chinatown was released. Set against the backdrop of the California water wars, in which Los Angeles businessmen fought to get control over water rights in the Owens Valley, the movie tells an intricate story of corrupt politicians, murder, and one very dysfunctional family. In The Big Goodbye, Sam Wasson tells the story of Chinatown’s making at a moment when the power in Hollywood was shifting from the director to the studios and their corporate owners.