Syracuse University

Joyce Carol Oates '60, H'00
For Excellence in Letters

Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's most prolific and versatile writers. She has written novels, collections of short stories, volumes of poetry, plays, innumerable essays and book reviews, as well as nonfiction works on literary subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the fiction of Dostoyevsky to studies of the gothic and horror genres. She also has written on such diverse subjects as the painter George Bellows and the boxer Mike Tyson.

Growing up on a farm in upstate New York, Oates displayed a precocious interest in books and writing. When she was only 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. Oates attended Syracuse University on scholarship, graduating in 1960 as class valedictorian with a degree in English. Following graduate school, she taught at the University of Detroit, where she witnessed the social turmoil engulfing America's cities in the 1960s. These violent realities influenced much of her early fiction, including her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, which was published when she was just 28.

In the following decade, Oates published new books at the extraordinary rate of two or three per year while teaching full time at the University of Windsor. In the early 1980s, she surprised critics and readers with a series of novels, beginning with Bellefluer, in which she reinvented the conventions of Gothic fiction, using them to reimagine  stretches of American history. Just as suddenly, she returned to her realistic style with a series of ambitious family chronicles, including You Must Remember This, which create a fictional world that mirrors the ambiguity and real world experience of our time.

Oates's work has earned many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award for "a lifetime of literary achievement," the 2004 Fairfax Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, to name just a few. In 1999, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for the third time. Her novel Them received the National Book Award.

Today, Oates continues to live and write in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Her newest work, Dear Husband, is described as "a gripping and moving new collection of stories.....which reimagines the meaning of family-by unexpected, often startling means."