Joyce Carol Oates

Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys (Dutton, 1996), Blonde (Ecco, 2000), The Falls (Ecco, 2004), The Gravedigger’s Daughter (Ecco, 2007), The Accursed (Ecco, 2013), as well as the forthcoming novel My Life as a Rat (Ecco, 2019). She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and 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.

 

CRITICISM / Spring 1987

Island, 1949

By Joyce Carol Oates

Walking the crude rock
  dam above the
rapids. Why are you
  doing it?—
you might fall,
  drown,

POETRY / Autumn 1979

Last Things

By Joyce Carol Oates

Combing my hair, a sudden snarl
in the pink teeth.

How silent, death entering.

Winter 1988

Foster Home

By Joyce Carol Oates

When we first saw Mary Miles, I will say that our hearts went out to her—you always seem to know, in the very first instant, when a person, particularly a child, is going to mean something special to you. Not that Mary Miles was a child...

FICTION / Winter 1980

The Birthday Celebration

By Joyce Carol Oates

he day Yolande ran away from home, never to return— never to return to Bellefleur Manor—was also the day of Germaine’s first birthday. But was there any connection between the two events. . . .?