Joyce Carol Oates

Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the National Book Award, the Rae Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction four times. She is the author of dozens of books, including Blonde (Ecco, 2000), We Were the Mulvaneys (Dutton, 1996), Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Dutton, 1990), You Must Remember This (Dutton, 1987), and them (Vanguard Press, 1969). Oates has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

See Work

FICTION / Summer 2019

The Cold

By Joyce Carol Oates ,  Illustration by Kim Ryu

When it began, I do not know. If I kept a journal or a diary, as some of you do, perhaps then I would know. But I don’t, and so I don’t. When the cold began to pursue me.
FICTION / Summer 2013

The Jesters

By Joyce Carol Oates

They had never seen these neighbors. Whoever lived on the far side of the wooded area were strangers to them. There was no occasion for the husband and the wife to drive on West Crescent Drive, which wasn’t easily accessible from the cul-...

FICTION / Fall 2012

A Book of Martyrs

By Joyce Carol Oates

The vow was unspoken between them: Once started on their drive into a more northerly part of the state, once embarked upon this journey, they could not turn back.

FICTION / Writers on Writers

EDickinsonRepliLuxe

By Joyce Carol Oates

So lonely! Shyly they glanced at each other across the dining room table in whose polished cherrywood surface candle flames shimmered like dimly recalled dreams. One said, “We should purchase a RepliLuxe,” as if only now thinking of it, and...

FICTION / Fall 2005

Smother

By Joyce Carol Oates

She was very young then. It had to be 1974 because she was in second grade at Buhr Elementary School, which was the faded-red-brick building set back from the busy street; she has forgotten the name of the street and much of her life at...

FICTION / Winter 2005

So Help Me God

By Joyce Carol Oates

Phone rings. My cousin Andrea answers. It’s a pelting-rain weekday evening last April, just past 7 p.m. and dark as midnight.

 

ESSAYS / Winter 1985

Romance and Anti-Romance: From Bronte’s Jane Eyre to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

By Joyce Carol Oates

Jean Rhys’s haunting and hallucinatory prose poem of a novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), boldly tells the story— authentic, intimate, and unsparing, because first-person confession—of Mrs. Bertha Rochester, the doomed madwoman of Charlotte...

POETRY / Autumn 1981

Boredom

By Joyce Carol Oates

There drifts the sky again,
Here, a single thought crawls slow as a flea.

 

 

POETRY / Spring 1987

Lost Creek

By Joyce Carol Oates

That shallow fast-running

  creek. White
rapids. The mud-colored
  water breaking
in anger brittle as
  bone.

 

POETRY / Autumn 1981

The Loss

By Joyce Carol Oates

The loss you can’t remember.
Crumbling walls, the mind’s stupor.
The haze at the horizon, the loss
indistinct, the stammered words
repeating themselves.
You can’t remember.