SOURCE: Johnson, Greg. “A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates's First Collection.” Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 1 (winter 1993): 1-14.

In the following essay, Johnson contends that Oates's first collection of short fiction, By the North Gate, “not only investigates virtually all the important themes that characterize her dozens of subsequent books, but also contains several stories that remain among her finest.”

The sheer abundance of Joyce Carol Oates's fiction has tended to forestall careful critical analysis of individual works, especially of her books published before her 1969 novel, them, which won the National Book Award in 1970 and remains her most-discussed longer work. In particular, her earliest short-story volumes have received little scrutiny, since most analysis has focused on The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970), which contains such familiar anthology staples as “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House...