SOURCE: "An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates," compiled by David Y. Todd, in Gettysburg: The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 291-99.

In the following interview, compiled from various question-and-answer sessions during the fall of 1990 while Oates visited at Bellarmine College, Oates addresses influences, her writing habits, the recurrence of violence in her work, and her personal literary philosophy.

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York, in 1938. She earned a B.A. from Syracuse University and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. Since 1978 she has taught at Princeton University and, with her husband, Raymond Smith, she runs the Ontario Review Press. Oates has published more than forty books of fiction, poetry, criticism, plays, and essays, and her novel them won the National Book Award in 1970. Recent works include a long essay, On Boxing (1988), the novels You Must Remember This (1987), American Appetites (1989), Because It Is...