[This entry was updated by Sarah Catlin Barnhart (University of South Carolina) from the update by Nancy Barendse (Charleston Southern University) in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, volume 6, pp. 216-241, of the entries by Michael...

Joyce Carol Oates was born in the small town of Lockport, New York, on 16 June 1938 and grew up in a rural setting nearby in Erie County. Together with her brother, Frederic, and sister, Lynn Ann, she was raised as a Roman Catholic in a home free from th...

In 1990 Joyce Carol Oates won both the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction and the Rea Award for the Short Story, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize that honors living American writers "who have made significant contributions to the...

Crown Room, Prince of Wales to Temporarily Close During Hotel Del Remodel There are some changes on the figurative menu for Carlsbad's Bellefleur Winery & Restaurant, which filed for bankruptcy in late August. During the Chapter 11 process, the court approved...

"Bellefleur" is the most ambitious book to come so far from that alarming phenomenon Joyce Carol Oates. However one may carp, the novel is proof, if any seems needed, that she is one of the great writers of our time. "Bellefleur" is a symbolic summation of all this novelist has been doing for 20-some years, a magnificent piece of daring, a tour de force of imagination and intellect…. What we learn, reading "Bellefleur," is that Joyce Carol Oates is essentiall...

American literature doesn't have many Russians, Dostoyevskys into whose ears a mad god dictates, writers who are possessed. Melville is one, and Faulkner is another, and Norman Mailer on occasion is a third, depending on the phase of his moon. Joyce Carol Oates, however, is a Russian, drunk on God and history, hearing voices, speaking tongues, slapdash and parenthetical and repetitious and headlong, as if she had been hurled out of time and memory and patience, as if the future were a killer whale. (...

When a plot grossly outweighs the main story, as it does here, the form is inefficient or else the novel is satirical. Bellefleur is definitely not satirical. It is an incredibly elaborate gothic romance, stuffed to overflowing with outsize, grotesquely intense characters who speak to one another breathlessly, in a rage or merely incoherently, and who beg to be taken as emblems for moral qualities or historical forces, or both. (p. 4) It is certainly possible to read and enjoy a novel with characters and in...