A Wonderful Writer

       To my mind, such writer deserves our attention and her life story should be highlighted for better understanding of her literary works. So...

   

 Joyce Carol Oates, pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly   (born June 16, 1938, Lockport, New York, U.S.), American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist noted for her vast literary output in a variety of styles and genres. Particularly effective are her depictions of violence and evil in modern society. (The suggested story for the analyses is also one of the examples of the evil in the society). 

     She taught English at the University of Detroit from 1961 to 1967 and at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, from 1967 to 1978. From 1978 she taught at Princeton University. In 1961 she married Raymond J. Smith (died 2008), a fellow English student who himself became a professor and an editor. With him she published The Ontario Review, a literary magazine.

     Early in her career Oates contributed short stories to a number of magazines and reviews, including the Prairie Schooner, Literary Review, Southwest Review, and Epoch, and in 1963 she published her first collection of short stories, By the North Gate. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, appeared in 1964 and was followed by a second short-story collection, Upon the Sweeping Flood (1965). She wrote prolifically thereafter, averaging about two books per year.

  Her notable fiction works include A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969; winner of a National Book Award), Do with Me What You Will (1973), Black Water (1992), Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), Zombie (1995), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), Broke Heart Blues (1999), The Falls (2004), My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008), Mudwoman (2012), Daddy Love (2013), Carthage (2014), and Jack of Spades (2015). Her forays into young adult fiction included Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002) and Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You (2012).

Oates also wrote mysteries (under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly), plays, essays, poetry, and literary criticism. Essays, reviews, and other prose pieces are included in Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (1999) and In Rough Country (2010). In 2011 Oates published the memoir A Widow’s Story, in which she mourned her husband’s death. The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (2015) is a memoir elliptically documenting her childhood.