Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, poet, and playwright whose enormous, restless output has placed her among the most prolific and most decorated writers in modern American letters. Author of more than sixty novels, hundreds of short stories, and dozens of volumes of poetry and criticism, she won the National Book Award in 1970 for her novel them and has been a perennial Nobel Prize contender.

She was born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Frederic James Oates, a tool-and-die designer, and Carolina Bush Oates. Raised on her maternal grandparents' farm in rural Erie County during the Second World War, she attended a one-room schoolhouse before entering Williamsville South High School. She graduated as valedictorian from Syracuse University in 1960 and earned a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961, the year she married fellow graduate student Raymond Smith.

Her first short-story collection, By the North Gate, appeared in 1963, and her second novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights, was a National Book Award finalist in 1967.

From 1968 she taught at the University of Windsor in Ontario, then in 1978 joined Princeton University as a professor of creative writing, where she has remained for more than four decades. Major later novels include Bellefleur, Black Water, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. After Smith's death in 2008 she married neuroscientist Charles Gross. She continues to publish at a steady pace.

The feminine name Joyce comes from the Old French Josce, ultimately from the Breton saint's name Iodoc meaning lord. She has made it a byword for productivity.