[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...

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...

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...

"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 uncertainties and of American reality in the raw." The...

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 was born into a working-class Catholic family...

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 married Raymond J. Smith. From 1961 to 1965 she was an...