Joyce Carol Oates: *1938

Joyce Carol Oates was born near Lockport, N.Y. on June 16, 1938. From an early age Oates had a love for writing, and as a young child she would illustrate stories with drawings and paintings. During high school she wrote a number of short stories although none was published.

While studying for her master's degree in English at the University of Wisconsin, Oates met her husband. The couple settled in Detroit in 1962 and the city served as the setting for several of her short stories and novels.

Between 1968 and 1978 Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada. In 1978 she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she continues to teach in the creative writing program.

In a book review Oates wrote: "Telling stories, I discovered at the age of three or four, is a way of being told stories. One picture yields another; one set of words another set of words. Like our dreams the stories we tell are also the stories we are told."

Joyce Carol Oates has published over 30 novels and novellas, including a series of experimental suspense novels under the name Rosamond Smith.

When a reporter called her a "workaholic," she replied, "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."