Joyce Carol Oates (Essay Date 1999)

SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. "Where Is an Author?" In Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going, pp. 3-8. New York: Plume, 1999.

In the following essay, Oates debates the question of how much information a reader should know about the author of a work and finds the label of "woman writer" to be restrictive and frustrating.

The artist's life is his work, and this is the place to observe him.

—Henry James

It all came together between the hand and the page.

—Samuel Beckett (on the composition of Waiting for Godot)

Why do we write? Why do we read? Why is "art" crucial to human beings?

The engine that gives its mysterious inner life to a work of art must be the subterranean expression of a wish, working its way to the surface of narrative. In fairy tales and legends, the "wish...