Joyce Carol Oates, High Lonesome:
New and Selected Short Stories
(New York: Ecco, 2006)Almost every discussion of Joyce Carol Oates makes note of her extraordinarily
large literary output. In a career that began in 1963 with the collection of short
stories By the North Gate, through 2009, Oates has published more than 128
books (novels, short-story collections, books of essays, other nonfiction, plays, and
volumes of poetry). This oeuvre is almost unheard of among nongenre writers in
contemporary times (although it would have been less unusual in the nineteenth
century). In comparison, Philip Roth and John Updike, writers considered fairly
prolific and of the same generation as Oates, published 30 and 60 books, respec-
tively, during that same time span. Sheer numbers, however, are not the only
notable fact about Oates’s career. The breadth of her work is certainly worthy of
note. While, as she says, she tends to write usually “about real people in a real
society,” she does so ranging in genres from straight realism to horror stories,
mystery, and gothic. Finally, Oates is important not so much for how much she
has written but for the depth with which she explores quintessentially American
themes: violence, family life, and the American dream.
Oates was born on 16 June 1938 on a farm near Lockport, New York. Her
childhood was not an easy one because of the family’s poverty, and, as she has
said, it was not “an environment that was particularly receptive to children being
creative.... So I more or less just found my own way” (“Writing and Weaving
an Emotional Thread”). As a child Oates wrote stories about her life on the farm
and her cats and horses. At the age of fourteen, however, she began “a kind of
apprentice life” by reading William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an activity
that helped develop her iconic authorial voice. Attending Syracuse University on
a scholarship, she continued to fine-tune her craft. At nineteen she won a fiction-
writing contest sponsored by the popular women’s magazine Mademoiselle. Oates
graduated valedictorian in 1960, after which she completed a master’s degree in
English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in one year.
Oates published With Shuddering Fall (1964), her first novel, when she was
twenty-six years old. She began the ambitious Wonderland Quartet with A Gar-
den of Earthly Delights (1967), which received a National Book Award nomi-
nation, as did later novels in the series, Expensive People (1968), them (1969),
and Wonderland (1971); them was awarded the National Book Award in 1970.
Oates envisioned these works “as critiques of America—American culture,
American values, American dreams—as well as narratives in which romantic
ambitions are confronted by what must be called ‘reality.’” (“Afterword” to 2006
edition of Expensive People). Three other novels have garnered Pulitzer Prize
nominations: Black Water (1992), based loosely on the Chappaquiddick incident
involving the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy; What I Lived For (1994), about
a self-made millionaire; and Blonde (2000), the fictional retelling of Marilyn