Joyce Carol Oates  (b. 1938) LINKS Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/southerr/criticism.html This site is maintained by a reference librarian at the University of San Francisco. It is by far the most comprehensive and authoritative Web site on Joyce Carol Oates. It includes an extensive bibliography of works by and about Oates; a list of her awards and honors; links to scholarly papers; a discussion group called "Tone Clusters," which includes an archive of saved discussions from the past two years; photographs; and information on her current projects. The Hall of Arts: Joyce Carol Oates http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/oat0int-1 The Academy of American Achievement is an interactive Web museum that features profiles on artists, thinkers, scientists, and activists who have made significant contributions in their fields. The Joyce Carol Oates pages include a discussion of her early writing life, video and audio clips from an interview with Oates, a biography, and a profile. BIOGRAPHY Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) was born in Lockport, New York, one of three children in a Roman Catholic family. She began to put picture stories down on paper even before she could write, and she remembers that her parents "dutifully" supplied her with lined tablets and gave her a typewriter when she was fourteen. In 1956, after Oates graduated from high school, she went on a scholarship to major in English at Syracuse University, but she did not devote most of her time to writing until after she received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. Discovering by chance that one of her stories had been cited in the honor roll of Martha Foley's annual The Best American Short Stories, Oates assembled the fourteen stories in her first book, By the North Gate (1963). It was the first of almost seventy books, making Oates one of our most prolific writers. In addition to short stories and novels, Oates regularly publishes poems, plays, literary criticism, and essays including her much admired essay collection On Boxing (1987). As a writer, critic, and professor at Princeton University, Oates dedicates her life to "promoting and exploring literature...I am not conscious of being in any particular literary tradition, though I share with my contemporaries an intense interest in the formal aspects of writing; each of my books is an experiment of a kind, an investigation of the relationship between a certain consciousness and its formal aesthetic expression."

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