One of the United States's most prolific and versatile contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) focuses upon the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern American society.Oates...
Read more
"Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than fifty novels and short story collections to her name," wrote Ian Thomson in the Spectator. "Yet she writes wonderfully of life's un...
Read more
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, sh...
Read more
Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She completed her B.A. at Syracuse University in 1960, and she was awarded an M.A. by the University of Wisconsin in 1961. On 23 January 1961 she marr...
Read more
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...
Read more
[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 Biogra...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Gardner
"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 s...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Leonard
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 anot...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Calvin Batchelor
Joyce Carol Oates's 12th novel, Bellefleur, is stuffed with … joyous, breathless nonsense. It is the great gift here. One begins this overlong, v...
Read more
Critical Essay by Russell Banks
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...
Read more
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
Critical Essay by John Gardner
