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

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. . . .?

CRITICISM / Summer 1997

The Stone Well

By Joyce Carol Oates

Six feet from the rim the old vertigo begins.
In the tall grass flattened and gone to seed.
In the white glare of the October sun.

CRITICISM / Summer 1984

The Masquers

By Joyce Carol Oates

I am lying, you say hesitantly, tasting
the thin syllables, gauging their feathery weight
in the air: chill fine whining notes.