Joyce Carol Oates
Born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, Joyce Carol Oates spent her childhood on her parents’ farm. Lockport, a small rural town, had struggled economically since the Great Depression, but it provided Oates with a wholesome environment in which to grow up. She attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse, where she developed a fascination with writing. Although her parents were not highly educated, they were always supportive of her budding talents. Oates’s grandmother gave her a typewriter when she was a teenager, and in high school she used it to write novels and short stories. She won a scholarship to Syracuse University, where she majored in English and graduated as valedictorian. She subsequently pursued and received a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin. While studying there, she met her future husband, Raymond Smith. Though she kept her maiden name, she would later publish suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith.
After marrying Smith in 1962, Oates and her new husband relocated to Detroit, where the bleak atmosphere and social turmoil that characterized Detroit in the 1960s influenced much of Oates’s writing. After securing a teaching position at the University of Windsor in 1968, she and Smith relocated to Canada for a ten-year period. In Canada, they started a small publishing house and literary magazine, the Ontario Review. In 1978, Oates and Smith moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where Oates is currently the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.
Oates’s fiction has garnered much critical acclaim. She is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—for Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde(2000). In 1970, she won the National Book Award for her novel them (1969). Before winning, she had been a finalist three times—for Wonderland (1971);Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); and Blonde (2000). She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for What I Lived For and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Black Water, among many other achievements. Many of her short stories have won the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in annual anthology The Best American Short Stories.
Aside from the merits of her fiction, Oates is perhaps equally famous for her almost unbelievably large output. After publishing her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964, Oates has gone on to publish close to fifty novels and novellas, close to thirty collections of short stories, eight books of poetry, eight books of plays, and many volumes of essays and criticism. In 1996, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for a lifetime of literary achievement.
Inspiration for “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, as told by Robert Davidson
In the fall of 1966 Joyce Carol Oates published a short story entitled Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? The story is dedicated To Bob Dylan. After hearing Oates read a couple of years ago, I asked her why that story was dedicated to Dylan. Was it because the story's title, a ref to A Hard Rain...?
Oates said the real reason she dedicated the story to Dylan was because she'd been inspired to write the story after listening to "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." As soon as she said that, it made a lot of sense to me. The short story (which is an excellent short story in its own right) has some, perhaps, explicit ties to Dylan's song.
Lines from Dylan's song like:
"The vagabond who's rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore"
are obvious in the short story. But there are other, more intuitive connections as well. More to do with the mood and tone of the story and some of the subtle observations Oates makes about popular music and its effects on kids (she is not preaching). And, I think it should be said, Oates probably views the quality of Dylan's songwriting as an antidote, rather than a poison.
