Joyce Carol Oates, an American writer, holds a unique place in twentieth century literature. She won acclaim during her lifetime as a novelist and essayist and short story writer. The themes of Joyce Carol Oates are imposing and she portrays the social and psychological problems which are faced by the contemporary men and women in their day-to-day life. She is at her best in projecting the harsh and violent world of the present time. She presents a realistic sensation of life with a moral lesson to the reader. Joyce Carol Oates, like any other writer, selects out of the vast store of her experience. Daniel Hoffman says in his Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, “Creativity thrived with alienation, some postwar writers insisted-or at least they held that the condition of alienation which had played a nurturing role in fostering modern art, literature, and thought was too precious a heritage to sell for an academic chair or a government post” (8).
The tragic homelessness and the alienation are the basic themes of the modern writers. Oates too is accustomed with this tradition. The protest movements and the movements for social justice, the women’s rights movement and a number of shocking events like the assassination of President Kenndy in 1963, of Malcoln X in 1965, Martin Luther King in 1967, and of Robert Kennedy in 1968 and the Watergate Scandal, which lead to the feelings of doubt, anxiety and instability, and above all the violence in the society have been pictured in the literature of this period. So Oates’s writings find no exception from the reflection of all these emotion. The drug-addicted young, unsexed and affectless begging from strangers in the streets of any large North American city was a common sc...
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Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16th, 1938, in Lockport, New York. Raised on her parent’s farm in a rural area that had been hit by the Great Depression, she attended the same one-room school house as her mother. As a young child, Oates developed a love of literature and writing well beyond her years. She was very encouraged by her parents and grandparents to pursue her love of writing and as a teenager she was given her first typewriter. This was when her passion finally came to life. In 1953 at the age of only 15, she wrote her first novel about the rehabilitation of a drug dealer, which was later turned down by the publisher because the topic was not suitable for a young audience. Although her novels do focus on the horrors of society, her childhood growing up was no reflection of that. Oates has admitted that her childhood was “dull, ordinary and nothing people would be interested in. Oates continued writing throughout high school and earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University. There she graduated at the top of her class in 1960, and in...
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To the uninitiated, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. Working his way through "Greenleaf," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader feels an existential hollowness reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's imagination appears a barren, godless plane of meaninglessness, punctuated by pockets of random, mindless cruelty.
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