Joyce Carol Oates Talks About Learning To Craft A Story

Joyce Carol Oates, prolific author of more than 160 books, is a five-time Pulitzer finalist and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said in The Nation that “a future archaeologist equipped with only her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.” Oates is the author of 44 novels, including them (1969), winner of the National Book Award, Black Water (1992), Foxfire (1993), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), and Blonde (2000). She received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2010.

Her novel The Man Without a Shadow (2016), is a love story about an ambitious neuroscientist and the handsome amnesiac under her care. The Washington Post reviewer called it, “one of the most curious and moving love affairs in contemporary fiction.” Oates is also the author of a memoir of her working class, Upstate New York girlhood, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (2015). Oprah’s O. Magazine called it “a tender-hearted excavation of her hardscrabble early life,” and said, “in sharing with us the lost landscape of her childhood, she has ensured it will never be forgotten.”