Joyce Carol Oates is an American author born on 16th June 1938 in Lockport, New York. She was very keen on reading and writing from an early age and her first love was a gift from her paternal grandmother; Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’. Oates considers this book the greatest literary inspiration of her life. Oates graduated in 1956 from Williamsville South High School. She got a scholarship and enrolled in ‘Syracuse University’. During this time she read the works of many notable authors such as Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Hemingway and Charlotte Bronte. She graduated as a valedictorian with a degree in English in 1960. She did her Masters from the University of Winconsin-Madison in 1961.
Her first work was published by Vanguard Press in 1963. It was a short story collection called ‘By the North Gate’. Her first authored novel was called ‘With Shuddering Fall’ and it was published in 1964 followed by ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been’ in 1966. Her short story titled ‘In a Region of Ice’ was next in 1966 and it won the ‘O. Henry Award’. Her 1967 novel was ‘A Garden of Early Delights’. Joyce Carol Oates’s novel ‘Them’ received the ‘National Book Award for Fiction’ in 1970. As a writer she is highly inspired by Franz Kafka and James Joyce. Oates has written more than fifty novels some of which are ‘Expensive People’ (1968), ‘The Assassins’ (1975), ‘Son of the Morning’ (1978), ‘A Bloodsmoor Romance’ (1982), ‘Mysteries of Winterthurn’ (1984), ‘You Must Remember This’ (1987), ‘Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart’ (1990), ‘We Were The Mulvaneys’ (1996), ‘Middle Age: A Romance’ (2001), ‘The Tattooed Girl’ (2003), ‘