Saturday Show #77: The Tryst by Joyce Carol Oates

Summary: The Austin Writing Workshop discusses “The Tryst” by Joyce Carol Oates.<br> From Wikipedia:<br> Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over forty novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award,[1] for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.<br> Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978 and is currently the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.<br> Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She is the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent,[3][4] and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer.[3][5] She was raised Catholic but is now atheist.[6] Her brother, Fred Jr., was born in 1943, and her sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely autistic, was born in 1956.[3] Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York,[7] and characterized hers as “a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status”.[3] Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was “very close” to Joyce.[7] After Blanche’s death, Joyce learned that Blanche’s father had killed himself, and Blanche had subsequently concealed her Jewish heritage; Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother’s life in writing the novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).[7]<br> Oates attended the same one-room school her mother attended as a child.[3] 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. This was love at first sight!”[8] In her early teens, she devoured the writing of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, whose “influences remain very deep”.[9] Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter.[7] Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools[3] and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper.[citation needed] She was the first in her family to complete high school.[3]<br> Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined Phi Mu.[10] Oates found Syracuse “a very exciting place academically and intellectually”, and trained herself by “writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them.”[11] It was not until this point that Oates began reading the work of Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O’Connor though, she noted, “these influences are still quite strong, pervasive.”[9] At the age of 19, she won the “college short story” contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in English as valedictorian in 1960[12] and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961. She was a Ph.D. student at Rice University when she made the decision to become a full-time writer.[13]<br> Evelyn Shrifte, president of the Vanguard Press, met Oates soon after Oates received her master’s degree. “She was fresh out of school, and I thought she was a genius”, Shrifte said. Vanguard published Oates’ first book, the short-story collection By the North Gate, in 1963.[14]<br> Career<br><br> The Vanguard Press published Oates’ first novel,