Wonderland

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 Brontës, 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 quartet about different socioeconomic groups in America that incorporates
Expensive People
(1968),
them
(1969), for which she won the National Book Award, and
Wonderland
(1971). 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, Mann—Oates 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 and Other Stories
(1970),
Marriages and Infidelities
(1972),
The Goddess and Other Women
(1974),
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
(1974),
The Hungry Ghosts
(1974),
The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese
(1975),
The Seduction and Other Stories
(1975),
Crossing the Border
(1976),
Night-Side
(1977), and
All the Good People I’ve Left Behind
(1978). “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.

“Joyce Carol Oates is that rarity in American fiction, a writer who seems to grow with each new book,” said
Time
. She set out in new directions in the 1980s with an acclaimed series of bestselling novels that exploit the conventions of Gothic literature:
Bellefleur
(1980),
A Bloodsmoor Romance
(1982), and
Mysteries of Winterthurn
(1984). In addition she wrote
Angel of Light
(1981),
Solstice
(1985)
, Marya: A Life
(1986),
You Must Remember This
(1987), and
American Appetites
(1989): a succession of works that make it clear why
Commonweal deemed
her “the most relentless chronicler of America and its nightmares since Poe.” “Oates’s best novels are strongly reminiscent of Faulkner’s, especially in their uncompromised vision of the violence her characters visit upon one another and themselves,” said
The Washington Post Book World
. “Even her humor—and she can be hilariously funny—is mordantly ironical.” Using the pseudonym Rosamond Smith she began writing a series of psychological suspense novels:
Lives of the Twins
(1987),
Soul/Mate
(1989),
Nemesis
(1990),
Snake Eyes
(1992),
You Can’t Catch Me
(1995),
Double Delight
(1997), and
Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon
(1999). Her compilations of short stories continued with
The Lamb of Abyssalia
(1980),
A Sentimental Education
(1980),
Last Days
(1984),
Wild Nights
(1985),
Raven’s Wing
(1986), and
The Assignation
(1988). In addition she enjoyed great success with
On Boxing
(1987), an eloquent meditation on prizefighting.