Declaration of Independence
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published on Salon.com, September 29, 1997 Jane Eyre abounds in mysteries and surprises. The most immediate, for Charlotte Brontë’s contemporaries, was the identity of the author of […]
Jane Eyre: An Introduction
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published as a preface to Jane Eyre (Bantam Classic, 1988); it appeared in an earlier version under the title “Romance and Anti-Romance: From Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso […]
American Literary Culture: A Personal Perspective
Though I was writing and publishing before I came to live in Detroit in 1962, it was only in this city that I conceived of a personal body of literature in which the unique and the emblematic might be conjoined; and the private, the domestic, the idiosyncratic yoked to larger social and political concerns (in such Detroit-set novels as them and Do With Me What You Will, and such historically focused novels as Angel of Light, Wonderland, and You Must Remember This).
Introduction: American Gothic Tales
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally Published in American Gothic Tales Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. […]
Reflections on the Grotesque
By Joyce Carol Oates Originally published as an Afterword to Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque What is the “grotesque”—and what is “horror”—in art? And why do these seemingly repellent states of […]
Introduction: The Oxford Book of American Short Stories
I first read this unclassifiable prose piece— hardly a “tale” in any conventional sense, still less a “story”—when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University, and I have been haunted by its images ever since. Herman Melville, our first native feminist?—can it be so?
The Myth of the Isolated Artist
It is my conviction that all human beings “create” personality. Some do so passively, helplessly, and are in a sense created by others, whom they come to fear or hate; others create their personalities half-consciously, and are therefore half-pleased with their creations, though they suspect something is missing; a few human beings, gifted with the ability to “see” themselves as “other,” and not overly intoxicated with the selfness of the self, actually devise works of art that are autobiographical statements of a hypothetical, reality-testing nature, which they submit with varying degrees of confidence to the judgment of their culture.
On Writers & Writing
Read JCO’s take on classics and contemporaries, from William Shakespeare to Stephen King, as well as her view of the short story, the gothic & grotesque, American literary culture, and […]
“Us” and “them”
Eric K. Anderson reviews JCO’s novel The Sacrifice in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, and notes the references back to a much earlier novel. This new novel has a natural predecessor in Oates’s National Book Award-winning novel them (1969). In this earlier novel the struggles of a lower middle class family are seen as running parallel to and becoming entangled with the 1967 […]
On Boxing
A longtime aficionado of the sweet science, Oates first became interested in boxing as a child, as an offshoot of her father’s interest.
Mike Tyson (1986)
Mike Tyson, a boy warrior, has become legendary, in a sense, before there is a legend to define him. And never has the collective will of a crowd—the very nearly palpable wish of a crowd—been more powerfully expressed than it is tonight in Las Vegas.
Paolo Galetto
The portrait of Joyce Carol Oates used on the banner of this website [January 2015] is by Italian artist Paolo Galetto. From his bio: Galetto was born in Turin in 1962. He […]
Why is “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” dedicated to Bob Dylan?
Joyce Carol Oates answers the frequently asked question: Joyce Carol Oates in San Francisco, City Arts & Lectures, 2004. Joyce Carol Oates on Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” […]
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Included in Prize Stories: O Henry Award Winners (1968), and The Best American Short Stories (1967). Introduction to “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Why is “Where Are You […]
Joyce Carol Oates Honored at Retirement Gala
Elaine Showalter reports on JCO’s Princeton retirement celebration: Joyce Carol Oates was celebrated Nov. 7 as she retires from the Princeton University Creative Writing Program after 36 years. It was a gala day […]
Appearances & Events
Those wishing to schedule a JCO speaking engagement should contact Steven Barclay at: steven@barclayagency.com, or visit the web site at: Steven Barclay Agency. February 26 – March 6, 2022 Joyce […]
Celestial Timepiece 