Joyce Carol Oates: Letters to a Biographer
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This rich compilation of Joyce Carol Oates's letters across four decades displays her warmth and generosity, her droll and sometimes wicked sense of humor, her phenomenal energy, and most of all, her mastery of the lost art of letter writing.
"It's hard to think of another writer with as fecund and protean an imagination as the eighty-five-year-old Joyce Carol Oates, who is surely on any short list of America's greatest living writers." —New York Times Magazine
In this generous selection of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters to her biographer and friend Greg Johnson, readers will discover a never-before-seen dimension of her phenomenal talent.
In 1975, when Johnson was a graduate student, he first wrote to Oates, already a world-famous author, and drew an appreciative, empathetic response. Soon the two began a fairly intense, largely epistolary friendship that would last until the present day. As time passed, letters became faxes, and faxes became emails, but the energy and vividness of Oates’s writing never abated. Her letters were often sprinkled with the names of well-known public figures, from John Updike and Toni Morrison to Steve Martin and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. There are also descriptions of far-flung travels she undertook with her first husband, the scholar and editor Raymond Smith, and with her second, the distinguished Princeton neuroscientist Charlie Gross. But much of Oates’s prose centered on the pleasures of her home life, including her pet cats and the wildlife outside her study window.
Whereas her academic essays and book reviews are eloquent in a formal manner, in these letters she is wholly relaxed, even when she is serious in her concerns. Like Johnson, she was always engaged in work, whether a long novel or a brief essay, and the letters give a fascinating glimpse into Oates’s writing practice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Johnson (Night Journey)—who published Invisible Writer, an authorized biography of Oates, in 1998—brings together an inviting compendium of his correspondence with the National Book Award winner from 1975 to 2006. Johnson first reached out to Oates in 1975 to express his admiration for her short story collection, The Poisoned Kiss, and what began as a cordial correspondence transformed over the ensuing years into a close friendship. The letters offer insights into Oates's views on her fiction and the process of writing; for example, a 1999 message likens the process of cutting down the original 1,400-page manuscript for Blonde to "yank out weeds from a garden." Other selections delve into Oates's personal life, particularly the poignant letters tracing the declining health and deaths of her parents in the early 2000s. Literary gossip hounds will appreciate some choice tidbits sprinkled throughout (Oates credits Philip Roth's late-'90s resurgence to the free time he enjoyed after alienating "virtually all" of his friends and lovers), but readers' attention will flag during the surfeit of messages about Johnson's fiction. Still, Oates's fans will enjoy this intimate glimpse inside her life.