'A great deal frightened me,' she said cryptically, but would not elaborate."
Traces of her early environment appear regularly in Oates's short stories and novels. Her most frequently used setting is Eden County, a fictional version of her western New York State milieu. She creates from the area near Buffalo, Lockport, and the Erie Canal a country of poor and wealthy farmers, small hamlets, towns, and growing cities. Lockport and the Erie Canal appear in Wonderland, while many of her other works are located in the rural areas of Eden, an allusive name, about which Oates has said, "It's not paradise at all. It's pretty bad as a matter of fact."
Creating fictional worlds has always been an obsession for Joyce Carol Oates . She began as a child--even before she could write she told her tales through pictures. During her elementary school years she wrote stories and constructed 200-page books, which she designed and bound herself. When she was fifteen her first novel submitted to a publisher was rejected as too depressing for the market of young readers; the book concerned a dope addict who is rehabilitated by caring for a black stallion.
Her writing continued after she matriculated at Syracuse University in 1956: she turned out a novel a semester while she majored in English and minored in philosophy.
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