Literature
Joyce Carol Oates
born 1938 · novelist, short-story writer, poet, professor
One of America's most prolific novelists, she taught at the University of Detroit in the 1960s and turned the city and its 1967 uprising into the National Book Award–winning novel them.
- Born
Lockport, New York
age 88- Also known as
- JCO · Rosamond Smith · Lauren Kelly
- Detroit years
- 1962–1968
- Field
- Literature
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Oates arrived in Detroit in 1962 with her husband, the scholar Raymond Smith, and joined the English faculty of the Jesuit-run University of Detroit on McNichols Road. The six years she spent in the city became the most formative of her early career: she later called Detroit the place that made her a serious writer. Living through the tensions of the mid-1960s and the July 1967 uprising, she gathered the material for them (1969), a sprawling novel that follows a poor white Detroit family from the 1930s to the riot, and which won the National Book Award in 1970. Other books of the period, such as Expensive People and Do with Me What You Will, are also set in Detroit and its suburbs. In 1968 she moved just across the river to teach at the University of Windsor, staying there for a decade before Princeton.
Highlights
- National Book Award for them (1969), a novel set in Detroit from the 1930s to 1967
- Taught English at the University of Detroit, 1962–1968
- More than 58 novels plus dozens of story, poetry and essay collections
- National Humanities Medal (2010) and Jerusalem Prize (2019)
- Pulitzer Prize finalist for Black Water, What I Lived For and Blonde
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Worked here · 1962–1968
University of Detroit (today University of Detroit Mercy), McNichols Campus
She taught English here for six years; the Jesuit university merged with Mercy College in 1990 to form the University of Detroit Mercy.