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Joyce Carol Oates Papers

An inventory of her papers at Syracuse University


Finding aid created by: KM
Date: Aug 1999

Biographical History

Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ) is an award-winning American writer of both fiction and non-fiction. A faculty member at Princeton University for more than forty years, she has taught creative writing there and at other institutions and is active as a reviewer and editor.

Oates was born in Lockport, New York, on June 16, 1938. She graduated from Williamsville South High School (with which she still maintains an active supportive relationship) in 1956, and from Syracuse University in 1960. She went on to earn her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961, and did post-graduate work at Rice University.

Oates wrote her first story at age 14 and published her first novel, By the North Gate, in 1963. Her best-known works are her short story "Where are you going, where have you been?" and for her novel Blonde, which is based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Both have been adapted to stage and screen, as have several of her other works. In addition to Blonde, some of her other novels take their inspiration from real people or events including Black Water (Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick), My Sister, My Love (Jon-Benet Ramsay), Babysitter (the so-called "Babysitter murders" in 1970s Michigan), and Butcher (19th-century surgeon J. Marion Sims). She has written a number of young adult novels, including Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002) and Freaky Green Eyes (2003), and several children's picture books featuring kittens, e.g. Come Meet Muffin! (1998). Her non-fiction, encompasses book reviews, literary and art criticism, meditations on the craft of writing, a memoir, and both serious and humorous essays on a wide range of topics from "art and ethics" to Lewis Carroll to the experience of driving a Ferrari Testarossa. Her long-standing interest in the sport of boxing has resulted in a book ( On Boxing, 1987) and several essays on the topic.

In her non-fiction Oates is "an empathetic reader and sympathetic and erudite critic," ( "Joyce Carol Oates," National Endowment for the Humanities), while in her novels and short stories she has explored themes of rural poverty, the working poor, racial and class tensions, female childhood/adolescence, and marital or family dynamics. Her fiction often encompasses or centers violent events such as suicide, rape, abduction, murder, and physical, emotional, or sexual abuse (including of children). She has responded to criticism on this count as follows:

"Why is your writing so violent?" Since it is commonly understood that serious writers, as distinct from entertainers or propagandists, take for their natural subjects the complexity of the world, its evils as well as its goods, it is always an insulting question; and it is always sexist....The serious writer, after all, bears witness. The serious writer restructures "reality" in the service of his or her art, and surely hopes for a unique esthetic vision and some felicity of language; but reality is always the foundation...[And] in fact, my writing isn't usually explicitly violent, but deals, most of the time, with the phenomenon of violence and its aftermath, in ways not unlike those of the Greek dramatists.
[Oates, "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?" New York Times, March 29, 1981 ( read full essay)]

Oates has received numerous awards and recognitions over the course of her career; these include the National Book Award for Fiction for them (1970), the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story (1996), two O. Henry Awards, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the National Humanities Medal (2010), and the Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2019). In 2007 the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year.

Oates has been married twice, to fellow writer Raymond Smith (1961-2008) and to neurologist Charles Gross (2009-2019). She is fond of cats, active on social media, and an atheist.

Scope and Contents of the Collection

The Joyce Carol Oates Papers consist of family correspondence, correspondence-subject files, financial and legal material, media, memorabilia, Ontario Review Press records, printed material, writings in manuscript form, writing in published form, unpublished material, and writings by others.

Family correspondence (RESTRICTED) contains letters, cards, and other items to and from Oates' parents, grandmother, and brother.

Correspondence-subject files (RESTRICTED) is both professional and personal in nature. Professional includes editors (particularly Daniel Halpern of Harper Collins and Bob Silvers of the New York Review of Books); publishers (Dutton, Ecco, Fourth Estate, Harper Collins, Mondadori, Penguin, Philippe Rey); translators (Francesc Parcerisas, Claude Seban, Yoko Yoshioka, Zhuang Yan); theatres and theatre directors (Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Repertory Theatre, L.A. Theatre Works, Long Wharf Theatre [New Haven, CT], McCarter Theatre [Princeton, NJ], Penlight Theater [Minneapolis, MN], Provincetown Theater Company, Ari Roth of Theater J [Washington DC], Strindberg Theatre [Stockholm]); and collaborators on various projects (Stig Bjorkman, editor of Joyce Carol Oates: Samtal med Stig Björkman; Greg Johnson, Oates scholar and biographer; Randy Souther, who maintains the Oates-focused website Celestial Timepiece). Friends, some of whom date back to Oates's childhood or college years, include Russell Banks, Henry and Leigh Bienen, Joel Conarroe, Jane Creech, Ellen Datlow, Richard and Kristina Ford, Gail Godwin, Larry and Nancy Goldstein, Colleen Grissom, Bill Heyen, Seward and Joyce Johnson, Lawrence (Larry) Joseph and Nancy Van Goethen, Ronald Levao and Susan Wolfson, Steve Martin, Brad Morrow, Elaine Pagels, Robert S. Phillips, Carol and Jim Rocamora, Elaine Showalter, Catherine (Kay) Smith, Richard and Annabelle Trenner, John Updike, and Gloria Vanderbilt.

Financial and legal material contains contracts with publishers; copyright assignment and registration forms; licensing agreements for audio, video, and performance; motion picture "options"; reprint permissions, most of which are for anthologies or educational course material packets; speaking and appearance engagement agreements; and a small amount of tax information and miscellaneous material.

Media contains commercial and non-commercial audio and video recordings. Appearances by Oates contains recordings of events or venues at which Oates spoke, including radio and television interviews, awards dinners, commencements, readings, lectures, panel discussions, introductions of others, and so on. Audiobooks contains commercially-produced audio adaptations of books and short stories, most in English but a few in other languages. The series also contains recordings of inspirations, performances, and adaptations -- that is, pieces which were adapted from or inspired by her work, including film, drama, music, and animation. The few miscellaneous items include "Gloria Vanderbilt's Dream Boxes" and a video tribute to boxing coach Cus D'Amato, created by the Boxing Hall of Fame and sent to Oates in recognition of her interest in and writings on the sport. At the end of this series are a few miscellaneous and unidentified recordings.

Memorabilia consists of material marking events, incidents, achievements, and relationships. These include awards and honorary degrees; childhood and college items; calendars, cartoons, and crossword puzzles in which Oates makes an appearance; course evaluations from her teaching days; invitations and programs from events including to the White House; itineraries, many of which are annotated by Oates with her thoughts about the event, venue, or attendees; photographs and scrapbooks; student responses to Oates' work; tributes, gifts, and thank-yous from friends and fans; and a wide range of miscellany such as buttons and coffee mugs.

The Ontario Review Press series pertains to both the company and the literary magazine founded and run by Oates and her first husband, Ray Smith. Types of material include administrative records, correspondence with and information about contributors, and production material, including a mock-up of the first issue of the magazine. Issues of Ontario Review itself have been cataloged and may be found through Libraries Search .

Printed material is entirely about Oates and her work. The series contains articles about and interviews with Oates; publicity for publication or performances of her work as well as for conference appearances, lectures, workshops, etc.; and reviews of her work, primarily books and plays.

Writings, manuscript material comprises material generated by Oates during the creative process. (Note that manuscript material pertaining to works which have never been published are restricted; see Writings, unpublished below.) Types of material include worksheets, outlines, notes, fragments, drafts, typescripts, galleys, page proofs, jacket art, and advance reading copies. This series is subdivided by type of material into articles and essays; books; forewords, prefaces and introductions; librettos; Joyce's journals; letters to the editor; plays; poetry; reviews (of books by other authors); screenplays (including a version of "You must remember this" written for Martin Scorsese); and stories. Filed at the end are miscellaneous items such as Oates' introductions of other people, notes for English seminars given at the University of Windsor and Princeton, and letters Oates sent to the US State Department regarding the deportation of John Lennon.

Writings, published material comprises published versions of Oates' work, except for published editions of her books which have been separated from the collection and cataloged (see Related Material below). Like the manuscript writings, this series is also subdivided by type: articles and essays, books, broadsides, excerpts, letters to the editor, literary magazines, plays and librettos, poetry, quotes, reviews (of books by other people), and stories. The literary magazines subseries contains full issues of literary magazines, from Agni to Zoetrope: All-Story that contain work by Oates; the other subseries are clippings from magazines, journals, newspapers, etc. At the end is a small amount of miscellany, including what appears to be a newspaper insert entitled "The triumph of the spider monkey: the exclusive first-person confession of the maniac Bobbie Gotteson, by Bobbie Gotteson as told to Joyce Carol Oates and edited by the Sunday sentinel team."

Writings, unpublished (RESTRICTED) contains articles, plays, poems, short stories, and three novels which have never been published.

Writings by others contains adaptations -- that is, creative works by others based on Oates's work -- and scholarly analysis and criticism of her work. Adaptations include the typescript of a stage version of Blonde written by Argia Coppola; a poetry adaptation of Rape: A Love Story; a musical stage version of Black Water; and a graphic/cartoon adaptation of "Don't you trust me?" for the 2006 Sexy Chix Anthology of Women Cartoonists. Criticism and interpretation explores Oates's work in terms of violence, the feminist esthetic, female consciousness, cultural conflict, paedomorphosis, family, and obsession. Most are single essays but some are book chapters, and there is also a copy of Editions L'Herne's J.C. Oates (part of their "Cahiers de l'Herne" literary criticism series) by Caroline Marquette and Tanya Tromble-Giraud.

Arrangement of the Collection

The collection is divided into 11 series, as outlined above in the Scope and Content. Throughout the collection, with two exceptions, material is arranged alphabetically by name, title, or type/format. Exceptions are: (1) Within Printed material, the two subseries Articles about and Interviews are arranged chronologically; (2) Within Writings, manuscript material, in the Books subseries, the material for each book is arranged in roughly chronological order -- that is, worksheets come first as the earliest stage in a book, followed by drafts, proofs, jacket art, and finally advance reading copies.

Worksheets were originally in large envelopes, labeled with a date range and one or more titles ( view photograph of sample envelope, exterior) ( view photograph of sample envelope, interior) ( view photograph of sample envelope, contents removed). The label did not always accurately reflect the contents. We have to the best of our ability placed the material with the work to which it belongs, but we cannot guarantee we have done so correctly in every case.

Restrictions

Access Restrictions:

Access to personal incoming or outgoing correspondence, unpublished materials, and/or journals/diaries is restricted and requires prior written permission by Joyce Carol Oates.

Access to the typescript "Lucien Florey" is restricted to 50 years after Ms. Oates' death unless prior written permission by Ms. Oates is granted.

Student feedback is restricted under the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Some contracts contain personal information that is protected by law (e.g., social security numbers). Redacted copies of these have been placed in the collection; originals are in internal department files.

Access to audiovisual material requires advance notice to produce a use copy.

The majority of our archival and manuscript collections are housed offsite and require advanced notice for retrieval. Researchers are encouraged to contact us in advance concerning the collection material they wish to access for their research.

Use Restrictions:

Written permission must be obtained from SCRC and all relevant rights holders before publishing quotations, excerpts or images from any materials in this collection.

Related Material

All books by Oates have been transferred to Rare Books for cataloging as a named collection -- that is, they have OATES as part of their call number. There are more than 1000 volumes, in English but also in more than 25 languages including Croatian, Danish, Japanese, Polish, and Korean. Please refer to Libraries Search and search for OATES in the call number, or for "Gift of Joyce Carol Oates" as a phrase, to locate these items.

Two cookies, on which appeared the covers of Blonde and The Lost Landscape, were discarded due to deterioration and the fact that retaining them would have posed conservation issues. Presumably they were part of a publicity event. They are however listed in the inventory below, with links to photographs of them.

Non-commercial media has been sent for digitization and will be available in late 2026.

The website Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork contains extensive material by and about Oates, including a comprehensive searchable database of her published work. The website is created and maintained by Randy Souther.

The Joyce Carol Oates Society is "an international community of scholars...[which seeks to foster communication and community among Oates scholars."

Subject Headings

Persons

Adams, Alice, 1926-1999.
Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939-
Banks, Russell, 1940-
Barth, John, 1930-
Barthelme, Donald.
Bellamy, Joe David.
Bender, Eileen Teper, 1935-
Bienen, Leigh B.
Bitker, Marjorie.
Boland, Eavan.
Boyers, Robert.
Buell, Frederick, 1942-
Butscher, Edward.
Calisher, Hortense.
Callaghan, Barry, 1937-
Carruth, Hayden, 1921-2008.
Coover, Robert.
Corsaro, Frank.
Creighton, Joanne V., 1942-
Curzon, Daniel.
Delbanco, Nicholas.
Didion, Joan.
Ditsky, John.
Ewert, William B.
Fagles, Robert.
Ford, Richard, 1944-
Franks, Lucinda.
Fromm, Harold.
Gardner, John, 1933-1982.
Garrett, George, 1929-2008.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.
Gibbons, Reginald.
Godwin, Gail.
Goldstein, Laurence, 1943-
Goyen, William.
Gray, Francine du Plessix.
Gregory, Blanche.
Halpern, Daniel, 1945-
Harpprecht, Klaus.
Harris, Jana.
Heyen, William, 1940-
Jacobsen, Josephine.
Johnson, Greg, 1953-
Keeley, Edmund.
King, Stephen, 1947-
Koch, Stephen, 1941-
Kumin, Maxine, 1925-2014.
Kunitz, Stanley, 1905-2006.
L'Heureux, John.
Lehman, David, 1948-
Levao, Ronald.
Levine, Philip, 1928-
Lindberg, Stanley W.
MacLeod, Alistair.
Mailer, Norman.
Malzberg, Barry N.
Marshall, Tom, 1938-1993.
Martin, Steve, 1945-
Mazzaro, Jerome.
McBride, Mekeel, 1950-
McNamara, Eugene.
McPhillips, Robert.
Meisel, Perry.
Milazzo, Lee.
Morris, Mary, 1947-
Moser, Barry.
Nemerov, Howard.
Newman, Charles, 1938-2006.
Oates, Joyce Carol, 1938-
Ostriker, Alicia.
Ozick, Cynthia.
Parini, Jay.
Phillips, Robert S.
Pinsker, Sanford.
Ranard, John.
Reed, John Robert, 1938-
Robertson, Mary Elsie, 1937-
Rosenblatt, Roger.
Roth, Philip.
Rudenstine, Angelica Zander.
Rudenstine, Neil L.
Shapiro, David, 1947-
Showalter, Elaine.
Smith, Raymond J.
Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004.
Stanford, Donald E. (Donald Elwin), 1913-1998.
Stiles, Martha Bennett.
Theroux, Paul.
Trenner, Richard.
Tyler, Anne.
Updike, John.
Vanderbilt, Gloria, 1924-2019.
Wakoski, Diane.
Weiss, Theodore Russell, 1916-2003.
Whelan, Gloria.
Wilson, Colin, 1931-2013.

Corporate Bodies

Ontario Review Press.

Associated Titles

Boulevard (New York, N.Y.)
Conjunctions.
Ellery Queen's mystery magazine.
Exile (Toronto)
Kenyon review.
Malahat review.
Michigan quarterly review.
Paris review.
Salmagundi.
Shenandoah.
Southern review (Baton Rouge, La.)
Tri-quarterly.

Subjects

Adolescence in literature.
American fiction -- Women authors.
Creative writing -- Study and teaching.
Dramatists, American.
Essayists, American.
Family in literature.
Gothic fiction (Literary genre)
Novelists, American -- 20th century.
Poetry, Modern -- 20th century.
Poets, American -- 20th century.
Tragic, The, in literature.
Women and literature.
Women authors -- 20th century.
Women dramatists, American.
Women in literature.
Women novelists, American.
Women poets, American.

Genres and Forms

Advertisements.
Audiobooks.
Audiocassettes.
Audiotapes.
Awards.
Book reviews.
Books.
Clippings (nformation artifacts)
Compact discs.
Contracts.
Correspondence.
DVDs.
Diaries.
Drafts (documents)
Essays.
Flash drives.
Fliers (printed matter)
Floppy disks
Galley proofs.
Interviews
Itineraries.
Librettos (documents for music)
Manuscripts for publication.
Periodicals.
Photographs.
Poems.
Posters.
Programs (documents)
Royalty statements.
Scrapbooks.
Scripts (documents)
Sheet music.
Sound recordings.
VHS.
Videotapes.

Occupations

Authors.
College teachers.
Dramatists.
Essayists.
Novelists.
Poets.

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Preferred citation for this material is as follows:

Joyce Carol Oates Papers,
Special Collections Research Center,
Syracuse University Libraries

Acquisition Information

Gift of / purchase from Joyce Carol Oates, 1972-

Table of Contents

Family correspondence

Correspondence-subject files

Financial and legal material

Media

Memorabilia

Ontario Review Press

Printed material

Writings, manuscript material

Writings, published material

Writings, unpublished

Writings by others

Inventory

Note on alternate formats:

Non-commercial media has been sent for digitization and will be available in late 2026.