| 1 | Name: | Ms. Joyce Carol Oates | |
| Institution: | Princeton University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2016 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1938 | ||
Joyce Carol Oates is a leading American woman of letters. As a prolific and elegant writer of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry for over five decades, to the delight and astonishment of readers and critics, she probes a vast range of contemporary issues and themes including poverty, race relations, crime and violence, childhood and adolescence, love, sexuality and the roles of women, the movie industry, the boxing industry, the American city and suburb, and the American university. She has authored sympathetic and satiric fictionalized versions of public figures as diverse as Marilyn Monroe, Ted Kennedy and Woodrow Wilson, and as an erudite critic she has written brilliantly of, for example, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James and Simone Weil. She is the author of story collections Beautiful Days [2018] and Night-Gaunts [2018]. Her services to literature include co-editing The Ontario Review with her former husband Ray Smith, frequent reviews for The New York Review of Books and other journals, and mentoring a whole generation of younger writers fortunate enough to have been her students at Princeton University where she has been a professor since 1978. Her awards include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Humanities Medal. | |||