Joyce Carol Oates (The Sixties in America)

Early Life

Joyce Carol Oates’s childhood poverty and family violence influenced the themes she explores in her fiction; Erie County, New York, where she grew up, is the Eden County of her early fiction. Her father, Frederic Oates, quit school during the Depression after his father deserted the family. Oates’s mother, Carolyn Bush, was adopted as an infant when her father was murdered in a bar brawl. Oates, the first in her family to finish college, earned a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. One of the United States’ most honored writers, Oates...

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