Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates has often expressed an intense nostalgia for the time and place of her childhood, and her working-class upbringing is lovingly recalled in much of her fiction. Yet she has also admitted that the rural, rough-and-tumble surroundings of her early years involved "a daily scramble for existence." Growing up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York, she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the elementary grades. As a small child, she told stories instinctively by way of drawing and painting before learning how to write. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age fourteen, she began consciously training herself, "writing novel after novel" throughout high school and college. Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship; in 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality.Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, just across the Detroit river. During this immensely productive decade, she published new books at the rate of two or three per year, all the while maintaining a full-time academic career.

SON OF THE MORNING is the story of Nathanael Vickery conceived in sin but blessed with evangelical purpose. For him, even as a child of five, God is near; as a young boy it has already become clear that he must heed the call of the evangelical ministry. As his congregation grows to swelling point, as his stories about God and Christ become ever more compelling in their urgency, Nathaniel himself hears the voice of Jesus, knows the touch of the Lord, feels the triumph of submission. And within that triumph lies the evil seed of pride. "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" In this memorable novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells not only of the travail of a man who believes himself one of God's Chosen and thus loses the way, but looks into the hearts of those Americans who today follow so avidly evangelism's word. DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL brings to life in Elena Howe the year's most transfixing heroine. A novel with a contemporary setting reflecting today's social upheavals and shifting morality, it is, in the author's words, "a love story that concentrates upon the tension between two American 'pathways' : the way of tradition, or Law; and the way of spontaneous emotion-in this case, Love. In the synthesis of these two apparently contradictory forces lies the inevitable transformation of our culture. DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL suggests such a transformation-a drama of marriage and adultery that constructs an hour-by-hour, thought-by-thought experience both shattering and redemptive.