> 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