Happy Birthday to novelist Joyce Carol Oates!

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media, Garrison Keillor):
June 16 is the birthday of Joyce Carol Oates, born in Lockport, New York (1938). She grew up on her parents’ farm in nearby Millersport and used the area as the inspiration for the fictional Eden County, where many of her stories are set. When she was little, her grandmother would walk with her to the Lockport Public Library. She wrote in Smithsonian Magazine about the day she got her first library card there, as a child: “What is most striking in the children’s library are the shelves and shelves of books — bookcases lining the walls — books with brightly colored spines — astonishing to a little girl whose family lives in a farmhouse in the country where books are almost wholly unknown. That these books are available for children — for a child like me — all these books! — leaves me dazed, dazzled.”
Her parents weren’t educated, but they encouraged her in her passion for books and writing. “I can’t remember when I first began to tell stories — by drawing, it was then — but I must have been very young,” she said in an interview with The Paris Review. “It was an instinct I followed quite naturally.” Her grandmother gave Joyce her first typewriter when she was 14, and she never looked back, writing novel after novel in high school and then throwing them away immediately. She was the first in her family to graduate from high school, and she went on to Syracuse University, from which she graduated valedictorian of her class. Oates published her first story, “In the Old World,” in Mademoiselle magazine in 1959, just before her senior year of college. She published her first short-story collection, By the North Gate, in 1963, and her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1964.
In 2008, Oates’ husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, died suddenly after a bout of pneumonia. She wrote a memoir, A Widow’s Story (2011), to come to terms with her grief during the six months following his death. From the memoir: “Forever after, you will recognize those places — previously invisible, indiscernible — where memory pools accumulate. All the waiting areas of hospitals, hospital rooms, and, in particular, those regions of the hospital reserved for the very ill: Telemetry, Intensive Care. You will not wish to return to these places, where memory pools lie underfoot, as treacherous as acid.”
In her 50-year career, Oates — who writes for eight hours a day — has published more than 100 books. She’s written plays, poetry, novels, memoirs, story and essay collections, and works of criticism. She’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize five times. In addition to the numerous books published under her own name, she has also published suspense novels under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. Her latest book is the novel The Man Without a Shadow, and it just came out this year (2016). It’s the story of a man named Eli whose short-term memory was destroyed after he contracted encephalitis. It’s written in the present tense because Eli can only remember things that have happened in the last 70 seconds.
Joyce Carol Oates, who said: “We all have numerous identities that shift with circumstances. The writing self is likely to be a highly private, conjured sort of being — you would not find it in a grocery store.”