Marya: A Life Summary
Joyce Carol Oates

Everything you need to understand or teach Marya by Joyce Carol Oates.

Marya: A Life Summary & Study Guide

Marya: A Life Summary

One of Oates's most autobiographical novels, Marya traces the journey of the child Marya from her origins in the communities of Innisfail and Shaheen Falls in upstate New York to successful academic career, and a career as translator at the international level, and finally, back home as she decides to search for the alcoholic mother who abandoned her to a paternal aunt and uncle after her father was murdered...

(read more from the Short Guide)

Study Pack

The Marya: A Life Study Pack contains:

Marya Short Guide

Characters

Social Concerns/Themes

Techniques/Literary Precedents

Key Questions

Joyce Carol Oates Biographies (6)

Joyce Carol Oates

4,086 words, approx. 14 pages

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

5,720 words, approx. 20 pages

"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

6,862 words, approx. 23 pages

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

1,498 words, approx. 5 pages

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

Joyce Carol Oates

5,845 words, approx. 20 pages

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

Joyce Carol Oates

15,703 words, approx. 53 pages

[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

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Marya: A Life SummaryJoyce Carol Oates