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 the depressing economic problems which plague so many of her fictional families. Her father, Frederic James Oates, was employed as a tool and die designer, while her mother, Caroline Bush Oates, ran the household. Oates received her early education in a one-room country schoolhouse but attended junior and senior high school in town. In 1956 she graduated from Williamsville Central High School. Seldom does Oates discuss her growing up, and she dismissed this period of her life to a Newsweek interviewer as "`dull, ordinary, nothing people would be interested in,' not because it was really dull and ordinary but because it...