Joyce Carol Oates is the author of 58 novels and many novellas, plays, short stories, and other work. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize and a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Among Oates’ most notable works of horror are The Corn Maiden, Dis Mem Ber, The Doll Master, Haunted, Night Gaunt, Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon, and Zombie.
She grew up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age fourteen, she began consciously training herself, “writing novel after novel” throughout high school and college. While attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith. In 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her early novel,
them, along with a steady stream of other novels and short stories, grew out of her Detroit experience.
Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, just across the Detroit river. She published new books at the rate of two or three per year, while maintaining a full-time academic career. Though still in her thirties, Oates had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States. In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she taught in Princeton University’s creative writing program until 2014. She and her husband also operated a small press and published a literary magazine,
The Ontario Review. Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing
Bellefleur, the first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American history.
From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
