Interwoven with the family's tale are real people from the nineteenth century, including abolitionist John Brown and U. President Abraham Lincoln, the latter who in the novel fakes his own assassination in order to escape the pressures of public life.
Oates's novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang recounts in retrospect the destructive sisterhood of a group of teenage girls in the s. The story is pieced together from former Foxfire gang member Maddy Wirtz's memories and journal and takes place in the industrial New York town of Hammond.
The gang, led by the very charismatic and very angry Legs Sadovsky, directs its energy at men, the enemy force Legs perceives as responsible for the degradation and ruin of the girls' mothers and friends. The members celebrate their bond to one another by branding each others' shoulders with tattoos.
However, as they lash out with sex and violence against teachers and father figures, they "become demons themselves—violent and conniving and exuberant in their victories over the opposite sex," wrote Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Cynthia Kadohata.
Acknowledging to New York Times Book Review critic Lynn Karpen that Foxfire is one of her most overtly feminist books, Oates explained that she wanted to show that although "the bond of sisterhood can be very deep and emotionally gratifying," it is a fleeting, fragile bond. The two begin a romance after Matt's poor decision to make a joke to his friends about a school massacre results in a police investigation and Matt's ostracism by most of his classmates. Ursulla, an ungainly but capable athlete whose view of herself as ugly keeps her withdrawn from most of her fellow students, takes a public stand by coming to Matt's defense, despite the fact that she barely knows him.
Prompting several critics to compare its storyline to the events resulting in the O. Simpson trial of the early s, Freaky Green Eyes also focuses on a teenaged girl who must make a choice about whether action is better than inaction.
Francesca "Frankie" Pierson is the daughter of a wealthy but abusive sportscaster whom she idolizes. When her mother seems to intentionally provoke Frankie's father to anger by drifting away from the family, the teen becomes resentful, but after her mother disappears altogether Frankie is forced to view the relationship between her parents—as well as her own role in the dynamic of control and violence—in a new way. Praising Oates' for creating a "strong, intelligent young woman" protagonist, Kliatt reviewer Claire Rosser dubbed Freaky Green Eyes a "suspenseful story" in which the unfolding drama is "grippingly realistic.
While Oates plans to continue to write for teen readers, she explained to Publishers Weekly interviewer Kate Pavao that young-adult novels would not be a primary focus. I'm just very drawn to the adolescent personality. James Press Detroit, MI , America, March 16, , p. One of the United States's most prolific producing a lot of work and versatile producing a wide variety of work contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates focuses upon the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern American society.
The family lived on a farm owned by Caroline's parents. Joyce's father was a tool designer, and her mother was a housewife. Oates was a serious child who read a great deal. Even before she could write, she told stories by drawing pictures. She has said that her childhood "was dull, ordinary, nothing people would be interested in," but she has admitted that "a great deal frightened me. In , at age fifteen, Oates wrote her first novel, though it was rejected by publishers who found its subject matter, which concerned the rehabilitation the restoring to a useful state of a drug addict, too depressing for teenage audiences.
Before her senior year she was the co-winner of a fiction contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. After graduating at the top of her class in , Oates enrolled in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where she met Raymond Joseph Smith, an English professor.
They were married in In , after Oates earned her master's degree and began work on her doctorate in English, she found one of her own stories in Margaret Foley's collection Best American Short Stories.
Oates then decided on a writing career, and in she published her first volume of short stories, By the North Gate Oates also taught at the University of Detroit between and In she and her husband moved to Canada to teach at the University of Windsor, where together they founded the publication Ontario Review in After leaving the University of Windsor in , Oates became writer-in-residence and later a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. Lives of the Twins , which Oates wrote under the pseudonym of Rosamond Smith, presents a tale of love and erotic infatuation involving a woman, her lover, and her lover's twin brother.
With You Must Remember This , Oates returned to a naturalistic portrait of families under emotional and moral distress. Suicide attempts, violent beatings, disfiguring accidents, and incest figure prominently in this novel, which centers on an intense love affair between a former boxer and his adolescent niece.
Set in Eden County and containing references to such historical events as Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign, the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage, and the Korean War, You Must Remember This earned high praise for its evocation of American life during the early s.
John Updike stated that this work "rallies all [of Oates's] strengths and is exceedingly fine—a storm of experience whose reality we cannot doubt, a fusion of fact and feeling, vision and circumstance which holds together, and holds us to it, through our terror and dismay. Oates's works in other genres also address darker aspects of the human condition.
Most critics contend that Oates's short fiction, for which she has twice received the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, is best suited for evoking the urgency and emotional power of her principal themes.
Oates has also composed several dramas that were produced off-Broadway in New York and has published numerous volumes of poetry.
In addition, she is a respected essayist and literary critic whose nonfiction works are praised for the logic and sensibility with which she examines a variety of subjects. The novel "is partly made up of 'composite' characters and events, clearly influenced by the disturbances of the long hot summer of ," Oates acknowledges. She no longer suggests, as she did in the original author's note, that her protagonist Maureen Wendall was actually her former student.
That author's note, later repudiated by Oates as a fiction in itself, describes the book as "a work of history in fictional form," and asserts that Maureen's remembrances shaped the story: "[The book] is based mainly upon Maureen's numerous recollections….
In , Smith died unexpectedly of pneumonia-related complications. Oates suffered tremendously emotionally, and detailed the depths of her grief in the memoir A Widow's Story. She remarried in to Professor Charles Gross. In early , she published the novels Daddy Love , which recounts the horrifying experience of a boy who's kidnapped, and The Accursed , a Gothic, surreal tale that looks at Woodrow Wilson's time as the president of Princeton and the violent prejudice faced by the African-American community.
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