Joyce Carol Oates has often expressed an intense nostalgia for the time and
place of her childhood, and her working-class upbringing is lovingly
recalled in much of her fiction. Yet she has also admitted that the rural,
rough-and-tumble surroundings of her early years involved "a daily scramble
for existence." Growing up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York,
she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the elementary grades. As a small
child, she told stories instinctively by way of drawing and painting before
learning how to write. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age
fourteen, she began consciously training herself, "writing novel after
novel" throughout high school and college.

Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she
won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as
valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin,
where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship; in
1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions
suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her finest
early novel, them, along with a steady stream of other novels and short
stories, grew out of her Detroit experience. "Detroit, my 'great' subject,"
she has written, "made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am-for
better of worse."

Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada,
just across the Detroit river. During this immensely productive decade, she
published new books at the rate of two or three per year, all the while
maintaining a full-time academic career. Though still in her thirties, Oates
had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United
States. Asked repeatedly how she managed to produce so much excellent work
in a wide variety of genres, she gave variations of the same basic answer,
telling the New York Times in 1975 that "I have always lived a very
conventional life of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic,
no need, even, to organize my time." When a reporter labeled her a
"workaholic," she replied, "I am not conscious of working especially hard,
or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so
richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of
the word."

In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she continues to teach
in Princeton University's creative writing program; she and her husband also
operate a small press and publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing Bellefleur, the
first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked
established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American history.
Published in the early 1980s, these novels marked a departure from the
psychological realism of her earlier work. But Oates returned powerfully to
the realistic mode with ambitious family chronicles (You Must Remember This,
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart), novels of female
experience (Solstice, Marya : A Life), and even a series of pseudonymous
suspense novels (published under the name "Rosamond Smith") that again
represented a playful experiment with literary genre. As novelist John Barth
once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."

The dramatic trajectory of Oates's career, especially her amazing rise from
an economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the
world's most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the
mythic pursuit and achievement of the American dream. Yet for all her
success and fame, Oates's daily routine of teaching and writing has changed
very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human
activity remains steadfast. Not surprisingly, a quotation from that other
prolific American writer, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board over
her desk, and perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of her life and
writing: "We work in the dark-we do what we can-we give what we have. Our
doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness
of art."

from some website or another