Joyce Carol Oates Quote

My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books negatively except in those instances in which the negative is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.

Joyce Carol Oates

My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books negatively except in those instances in which the negative is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.

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About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.