Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.

[9] She characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status",[6] but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence".

[11] When Oates was a child, her next-door neighbor pleaded guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica Correctional Facility.

[6] She became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life.

[17] It was at this point that Oates began reading the work of Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O'Connor, and she noted, "these influences are still quite strong, pervasive".

"[24] Another early short story, "In a Region of Ice" (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1966[25]), features a young, gifted Jewish-American student.

It dramatizes his drift into protest against the world of education and the sober, established society of his parents, his depression, and eventually murder-cum-suicide.

[1] It is set in Detroit during a time span from the 1930s to the 1960s, most of it in black ghetto neighborhoods, and deals openly with crime, drugs, and racial and class conflicts.

Frequent topics in her work include rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, female childhood and adolescence, and occasionally the "fantastic".

[26] Violence is a constant in her work, even leading Oates to have written an essay in response to the question: "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?

"[27][28] In 1990, Oates discussed her novel, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, which also deals with themes of racial tension, and described "the experience of writing [it]" as "so intense it seemed almost electric".

[10] In 1996, Oates published We Were the Mulvaneys, a novel following the disintegration of an American family, which became a best-seller after being selected by Oprah's Book Club in 2001.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oates wrote several books, mostly suspense novels, under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

[32] One review of Oates's 1970 story collection The Wheel of Love characterized her as an author "of considerable talent" but at that time "far from being a great writer".

[33] Oates's 2006 short story "Landfill" was criticized because it drew on the death, several months earlier, of John A. Fiocco Jr., a 19-year-old New Jersey college student.

[35] Oates founded The Ontario Review, a literary magazine, in 1974 in Canada, with Raymond J. Smith, her husband and fellow graduate student, who would eventually become a professor of 18th-century literature.

Influenced by the Vietnam War, the 1967 Detroit race riots, and a job offer, Oates moved across the river into Canada in 1968 with her husband, to a teaching position at the University of Windsor in Ontario.

"[40] Oates served as advisor for Foer's senior thesis, which was an early version of his novel Everything Is Illuminated (published to acclaim in 2002).

[47] Oates opposed the shuttering of cultural institutions on Trump's first inauguration day as a protest against the President, stating that this "would only hurt artists.

"[31] Several publications have published lists of what they deem the best Joyce Carol Oates books, designed to help introduce readers to the author's daunting body of work.

In a 2003 article entitled "Joyce Carol Oates for dummies", The Rocky Mountain News recommended starting with her early short stories and the novels A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969), Wonderland (1971), Black Water (1992), and Blonde (2000).

[54] In 2006, The Times listed them, On Boxing (1987), Black Water, and High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006) as "The Pick of Joyce Carol Oates".

"[57] In a 2025 interview with The New Yorker, the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg suggested that "a new [Oates] reader should begin with the collection High Lonesome."

"[59][60] After six months of near suicidal grieving for Smith,[61] Oates met Charles Gross, a professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, at a dinner party at her home.

[64] As a diarist, Oates began keeping a detailed journal in 1973, documenting her personal and literary life; it eventually grew to "more than 4,000 single-spaced typewritten pages".

[68] Oates's extensive bibliography contains poetry, plays, criticism, short stories, eleven novellas, and sixty novels, including Them, Blonde, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, Black Water, Mudwoman, Carthage, The Man Without a Shadow, and A Book of American Martyrs.