Joyce Carol Oates Biography

Biography

Type: Writer

Born: June 16, 1938

Died:

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel "Them" (1969), two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels "Black Water" (1992), "What I Lived For" (1994), "Blonde" (2000), and short story collections "The Wheel of Love" and "Other Stories" (1970) and "Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories" (2014) were each nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978 and is currently the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

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