Celestial Timepiece

Joyce Carol Oates has “the creative vitality of the great 19th Century writers of fiction; … whose gothic plots are metaphors for states of psychic tension and tell us something essential about the American experience”

“Some find it difficult to believe that anyone so productive could be so good.”

—Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, welcoming JCO as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1978

“Joyce Carol Oates, born in 1938, was perhaps born a hundred years too late; she needs a lustier audience, a race of Victorian word-eaters, to be worthy of her astounding productivity.”

“She has, I fear, rather overwhelmed the puny, mean-minded critical establishment of this country. Single-mindedness and efficiency rather than haste underlie her prolificacy; if the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.”

—John Updike, Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

“A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.”

“Joyce Carol Oates has … become one of the elemental forces of American fiction, a daemon from the lower depths. And yet to the museum keepers of national culture, her skill at resisting critical containment must be unnerving. She picks up and discards generic forms at will: re-creating versions of familiar ones (the political thriller, the courtroom drama), and inventing new ones (her brilliant postmodern Gothic romances, for instance). She refuses to restrict herself to one subject, to one stratum of society, one personality type. Indeed, her very productivity stands as a reproach. Over [forty] years ago, Oates confessed to the ambition of putting the whole world in her fiction—an ambition she termed ‘laughably Balzacian.’ It may have seemed so to her. But no one is laughing now.”

—Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Nation

See also: The Glass Ark: A Joyce Carol Oates Bibliography