What I Lived For Summary
Joyce Carol Oates

Everything you need to understand or teach What I Lived For by Joyce Carol Oates.

What I Lived For Summary & Study Guide

What I Lived For Summary

Joyce Carol Oates takes the title of this novel from a chapter tide in Henry "David Thoreau's Walden (1854), "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For." Lurking behind Thoreau's description of his simple life that made him fully awake to the sustaining power of nature is his protest against the materialism and exploitation of nineteenth-century America.

He was not just escaping to Walden Pond but also escaping from a...

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Joyce Carol Oates Biographies (6)

Joyce Carol Oates

4,086 words, approx. 14 pages

One of the United States's most prolific and versatile contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) focuses upon the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern American society.Oates... Read more

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5,720 words, approx. 20 pages

"Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than fifty novels and short story collections to her name," wrote Ian Thomson in the Spectator. "Yet she writes wonderfully of life's un... Read more

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6,862 words, approx. 23 pages

Joyce Carol Oates was born in the small town of Lockport, New York, on 16 June 1938 and grew up in a rural setting nearby in Erie County. Together with her brother, Frederic, and sister, Lynn Ann, sh... Read more

Joyce Carol Oates

1,498 words, approx. 5 pages

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She completed her B.A. at Syracuse University in 1960, and she was awarded an M.A. by the University of Wisconsin in 1961. On 23 January 1961 she marr... Read more

Joyce Carol Oates

5,845 words, approx. 20 pages

In 1990 Joyce Carol Oates won both the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction and the Rea Award for the Short Story, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize that honors living American... Read more

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15,703 words, approx. 53 pages

[This entry was updated by Sarah Catlin Barnhart (University of South Carolina) from the update by Nancy Barendse (Charleston Southern University) in the Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biogra... Read more

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What I Lived For SummaryJoyce Carol Oates