Joyce Carol Oates
Overview
Joyce Carol Oates is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel them
Them (novel)
Them by Joyce Carol Oates is the third novel in The Wonderland Quartet, first published in 1969.-Plot:Them explores the complex struggles of American life through three down-on-their-luck characters—Loretta, Maureen and Jules—who are attempting to reach normality and the American dream through...

(1969) won the National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

, and her novels Black Water
Black Water (novella)
-Plot introduction:Kelly Kelleher, a twenty-six-year-old magazine writer, meets a United States Senator on whom she wrote her thesis at a Fourth of July party. "The Senator," as he is referred to in the novel , plans to take her to his hotel for a romantic rendezvous, but a car accident plunges...

(1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde
Blonde (novel)
Blonde is a bestselling 2000 historical novel by Joyce Carol Oates that chronicles the inner life of Marilyn Monroe, though Oates insists that the novel is a work of fiction that should not be regarded as a biography. It was a finalist for the National Book Award...

(2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

.
As of 2008, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, where she has taught since 1978.
Oates was born in Lockport
Lockport (city), New York
Lockport is a city in Niagara County, New York, United States. The population was 21,165 at the 2010 census. The name is derived from a set of Erie canal locks within the city. Lockport is the county seat of Niagara County and is surrounded by the town of Lockport...

, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 to Carolina Oates, a homemaker, and Frederic Oates, a tool and dye designer.
Quotations

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

Do What You Will, pt. 2, ch. 15

Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men.

"What Is the Connection Between Men and Women?" Mademoiselle (New York, Feb. 1970)

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.

"In the Founders’ Room," Unholy Loves (1979)

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space.

New York Times (July 27, 1980)

When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

New York Times (July 27, 1980)

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Quoted in "Master Race," Partisan Review 50th Anniversary Edition, ed. William Phillips (1985)

When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.

"Writers’ Hunger: Food as Metaphor," New York Times (August 19, 1986)

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

"Writers’ Hunger: Food as Metaphor," New York Times (August 19, 1986)

Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

" 'Soul at the White Heat': The Romance of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry," (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, E.P. Dutton (1988)

 
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