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In 1994, when doing research for Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (1998), I visited Oates's parents, Frederic and Carolina, in the modest home they had built on the Transit Highway in upstate New York, about seven miles from Lockport. The original farmhouse in which Oates and her two siblings grew up had been razed some years before, and Fred and Carolina's present home bore evidence of their famous daughter in almost every room-countless books, scrapbooks, and other memorabilia. When I asked Oates's mother what Joyce had been like as a child, she said enthusiastically, "Oh, she was always busy with this or that project. She drew when she was very young, and as she grew older she wrote all the time. And if something gave her trouble, she just kept going-she wouldn't quit. She always had to finish whatever she was doing."
This literary pertinacity would sustain Joyce Carol Oates through one of the most varied and productive careers in American literary history. On June 16,2018, Oates turned eighty, and this notable year has seen the publication, so far, of two new books-both story collections-in addition to paperback reissues of herfirst novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), and of a major novel published when she was 40, Son of the Morning (1978). This flurry of book publications has coincided, as usual, with the appearance of many reviews and essay-reviews in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and with further short stories and poems, in literary magazines, which presumably will appear in future collections. Age has had no effect whatsoever on Oates's literary engagement: as her mother said, "She just kept going."
When asked some years ago what she would like inscribed on her grave marker, Oates remarked tongue-in-cheek: "She certainly tried."
The publication of Oates 's new titles provides an ideal opportunity to take a backward glance at her long career in fiction. Like her major peer and friendly acquaintance John Updike, she has maintained a dual allegiance to both the short story and the novel, beginning her career with By the North Gate (1963), a remarkably unified collection set mostly in the fictional "Eden County" (based on the rural area surrounding Millersport, N.Y., where she had grown...