The Life and Works of Joyce Carol Oates

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English - History of Literature, Eras, grade: 3.0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: According to Greg Johnson, the bibliographer of Joyce Carol Oates, she is "the most talented, most inventive, and most exciting of American fiction writers" (Johnson, Invisible Writer XV). Novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, critic, teacher, editor, and publisher, Joyce Carol Oates is an artist of amazing versatility, productivity, and range. She is the author of more than 1,000 short stories, over 50 novels, dozens of books of essays, plays, and poetry (including a dozen novels published under two literary pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly). Her works are translated into more than 30 languages. Joyce Carol Oates is often characterized as a workaholic. But in "A Brief Biography" on her official web-site Greg Johnson quotes her reply to this statement in one of the interviews to the New York Times, where she said "I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word". Oates's productiveness has become not only one of her best-known attributes but also a great obstacle for new readers who are often confused by such an amount of her works and do not know what title they should start with. So in this paper besides the description of Joyce Carol Oates's life and literary legacy I single out her most notable and important works that ought to be read in the first place.