Author’s Biography

Early Life and Education:

Oates was born in Lockport, New York to Carolina Oates, a homemaker, and Frederic
Oates, a tool and die designer.[3] She was raised Catholic, and is now an atheist. Oates grew up in
the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York, and characterized hers as "a
happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status". Her
paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce.
After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that Blanche's father had killed himself and Blanche had
subsequently concealed her Jewish heritage; Oates eventually drew on aspects of her
grandmother's life in writing the 2007 novel The Gravedigger's Daughter.[5] A brother, Fred
Junior, was born in 1943, and a sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely autistic, was born in 1956.
Literary Career:
Oates published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was twenty-six
years old. In 1966, she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", a short story
dedicated to Bob Dylan and written after listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."[10]
The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of
Tucson".[11] The story was frequently anthologized and was adapted into the 1985 film Smooth
Talk, starring Laura Dern. In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted
for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?". Another noted early short story, "In a
Region of Ice" (1967) dramatizes the drift into protest against the world of education and sober,
established society of his parents, depression and eventual murder-cum-suicide act of a young,
gifted Jewish American student.
Like a number of other novels and short stories in her body of work, this was inspired by
a real-life incident, and Oates had been acquainted with the model of her protagonist. She
revisited this subject in the title story of her collection Last Days (1985).
Oates's novel them (1969) received the National Book Award in 1970; it is set in Detroit
during a time span from the 1930s to the 1960s, most of it in black ghetto neighborhoods, and
deals openly with crime, drugs and racial/class conflicts.
Again, some of the key characters and events were based on real people whom Oates had
known or heard of during her years in the city.
Since then she has published an average of two books a year. Frequent topics in her work
include rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, female childhood and
adolescence, and occasionally the supernatural. Violence is a constant in her work, even leading
Oates to have written an essay in response to the question, "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?"
She is a fan of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, describing Plath's sole novel The Bell Jar as a
"near perfect work of art"; but though Oates has often been compared to Plath, she disavows
Plath's romanticism about suicide and among her characters; she favors cunning, hardy
survivors, both women and men. Oates' concern with violence and other traditionally masculine
topics has won her the respect of such male authors as Norman Mailer. In the early 1980s, Oates
began writing stories in the gothic and horror genres; in her foray into these genres, Oates said
she was "deeply influenced" by Kafka and felt "a writerly kinship" with James Joyce. She gained
much attention for her book-length essay On Boxing (1987)
For more than twenty-five years, Oates has been rumored to be a "favorite" to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature by odds makers and critics. Her papers, held at Syracuse University,
include seventeen unpublished short stories and four unpublished or unfinished novellas. Oates
has said that most of her early unpublished work was "cheerfully thrown away.”