Joyce Carol Oates (1938– ) was born in Lockport, New York, a town so small that it had only a one-room schoolhouse. As a child she wrote her own stories. In her fiction, Erie County became Eden County, which she peopled with characters that reappeared in different books. At age twenty-six, Oates published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964). She was awarded the National Book Award in 1970 for her novel Them. A prolific writer, she has published over forty novels, twenty-five collections of short stories, eight volumes of poetry, and numerous plays and books of essays, all while maintaining a full-time career as a university professor at Princeton.

Fellow novelist John Barth says that Oates "writes all over the aesthetical map." She reads widely and has been influenced by the entire Western literary tradition, making it difficult to categorize her writing style. The hallmark of her fiction, however, may be its exploration of the modern psyche. She says, "the main thing about me is that I am enormously interested in other people, other lives, and that with the least provocation . . . I could 'go into' your personality and try to imagine it, try to find a way of dramatizing it. I am fascinated by people I meet, or don't meet, people I only correspond with, or read about; and I hope my interest in them isn't vampiristic, because I don't want to take life from them but only to honor the life in them, to give some permanent form to their personalities. It seems to me that there are so many people who are inarticulate but who suffer and doubt and love, nobly, who need to be immortalized or at least explained."