Born June 16th 1938–, American author, b. Lockport, N.Y., grad. B.A., Syracuse Univ., 1960, M.A., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1961. She taught English at the Univ. of Detroit and the Univ. of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and has been affiliated with Princeton Univ. since 1978.
Oates writes about contemporary American life, which she sees as often defined by violence. She is particularly concerned with the connection between violence and love. Her characters are mainly ordinary, inarticulate people who sublimate the terrible things that happen to them. Although some of her novels have been labeled gothic, the violence in them is neither mysterious nor necessarily dramatic; it occurs randomly as in everyday life.
An extraordinarily prolific writer, Oates has published dozens of novels. They include With Shuddering Fall (1964); a trilogy: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967, rev. ed. 2003), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969); Wonderland (1971); Childwold (1976); Cybele (1979); Bellefleur (1980); Solstice (1985); Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); What I Lived For (1994); We Were the Mulvaneys (1996); Man Crazy (1997); My Heart Laid Bare (1998); We Were the Mulvaneys (2000), Blonde (2000), a fictional work based on the life of Marilyn Monroe; Middle Age: A Romance (2001); The Tattooed Girl (2003); The Falls (2004); Rape; a Love Story (2005); Mother, Missing (2005), and Black Girl / White Girl (a searing double portrait of "black" and "white," of race and civil rights in post-Vietnam America).
Oates’s numerous short stories can be found in Wheel of Love (1970), A Sentimental Education (1981), Heat (1991), Will You Always Love Me? (1996), Faithless (2001), and I Am No One You Know (2004). The new collection High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006 brings many of her greatest stories together in one volume.
Oates also has published thrillers under the name Rosamond Smith, plus poems, plays, children’s fiction, essays, literary criticism, and a book on boxing (1988).
Her husband, Ray Smith, died on Feb 18th 2008 in Princeton; he was 77 years old, they had been married for 45 years.
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