Oates, Joyce Carol (Vol. 9) - Oates, Joyce Carol 1938–
Oates, Joyce Carol 1938–
Oates is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and critic now living in Canada. Her work is peopled with lonely characters engaged in a vain search for love and self-knowledge in an indifferent world. Violence forms a motif throughout Oates's work; her characters are its victims as well as its perpetrators. A serious artist, Oates has yet to write a major work. (See also CLC, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 6, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
Oates writes prose of striking directness and simplicity. Everything she writes bears the marks of a terrific imaginative pressure. That pressure is also the clue to her astonishing productivity…. The model of the driven writer, she invests everything she touches with the qualities of her own voice, which is nervous, fast, febrile and hot as an iron. I'd unhesitatingly say that she is one of the most important living American writers, and sadly...
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