Joyce Carol Oates

by Greg Johnson

Joyce Carol Oates is often called America's most prolific living writer, but it is perhaps her versatility that is most astounding. Just as she is a revered novelist, playwright, poet, and critic, the short stories gathered in her 21 published collections - from By the North Gate (1963) to Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) - vary in theme and style, although all evoke the bedrock natural and social reality that has consistently informed her fiction. In this comprehensive survey of Oates's stories, Greg Johnson selects eight of her collections that he considers most representative of her work and among her most successful books. He analyzes stories in which Oates experiments with form, genre, allusion, and Gothicism and presents postmodern allegories of American life.^ Separate chapters are devoted to Oates's early Eden County stories in By the North Gate and Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966), her stories focused on female experience in The Wheel of Love (1970) and The Goddess and Oth