Oates majored in English at Syracuse University (to which she won a scholarship) and won the Mademoiselle “college short story” competition in 1959, when she was just nineteen (Sylvia Plath received this coveted award in 1951). She gained her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in just a year, and had already embarked on her prolific writing career at this point, at times publishing two or three books in the space of twelve months. In 1962 she and her husband Raymond Smith moved to Detroit and stayed there until 1968, witnessing at first hand the civil unrest that overtook many American cities. She was “shaken” by the experience, and “brooded upon it.” She is now a professor at Princeton, but the violence and unease of the Detroit years still make their unnerving way into her fiction more than forty years later.
The sheer amount of Oates’s output can be bewildering. Her biographer Greg Johnson recalls his first visit to the Oates archive at Syracuse University, when he was beginning research for The Invisible Woman, his book on Oates. “My overwhelming impression was of the sheer amount of labor represented by these manuscripts…the novel manuscripts in particular were astonishing in their complexity.” Oates explains, “I like writing. I’m not a person who thinks in terms of her career. I think in terms of the work I’m doing.” She adds, “I don’t think I’m incredibly disciplined. I write in the mornings, I sometimes write through the afternoon, even the evening, but not every day. It’s not a schedule that’s rigid.”
Her earlier fiction was written in “one headlong plunge,” a rush of words across the page. Then she would “systematically rewrite the entire manuscript, first word to last…and this was the triumph of Art…control imposed upon passion.” Oates still writes every manuscript in longhand first, and then continues her work on a typewriter, editing each book as many as five times before she is happy with it. “I don’t have a computer. And I won’t let things go until I’m happy.” She doesn’t have hobbies, but likes to run, hike and cycle in the summer, before heading back to the study to get back to her writing. “I’m just trying to do the best work I can. Most writers are trying to do the best they can. You hope someone responds to the work, but then you move on to a new project.” It’s a pragmatic attitude to a prolific career. “People can get depressed and suicidal and upset with their work, but I look at that Hitchcock quote on my wall and remind myself it’s only a book, don’t worry, it’s not your life. It’s a good cautionary tale.”
“Oates…writes every manuscript in longhand first, and then continues her work on a typewriter, editing each book as many as five times before she is happy with it.”
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ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
The Edge of Impossibility:
Tragic Forms in Literature(1972)
New Heaven, New Earth:
The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)
Contraries (1981)
The Profane Art:
Essays and Reviews(1983)
On Boxing (1987)
(Woman) Writer:
Occasions and Opportunities (1988)
George Bellows:
American Artist (1995)
Where I’ve Been, And Where I’m Going:
Essays, Reviews, and Prose(1999)
The Faith of a Writer:
Life, Craft, Art(2003)
Uncensored:
Views & (Re)views(2005)
Copyright
ON BOXING. Copyright © 2006 by The Ontario Review, Inc.. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061846878
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