Joyce Carol Oates: Letters to a Biographer

In this generous selection of Joyce Carol Oates''s letters to her biographer and friend Greg Johnson, readers will discover a never-before-seen dimension of her phenomenal talent. In 1975, when Johnson was an undergraduate, he first wrote to Oates, already a world-famous author, and drew an appreciative, empathetic response. Soon the two began a fairly intense, largely epistolary friendship that would last until the present day. As time passed, letters became faxes, and faxes became emails, but the energy and vividness of Oates''s writing never abated. Her letters are often sprinkled with the names of famous people, from John Updike and Toni Morrison to Steve Martin and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. There are also descriptions of far-flung travels she undertook with her first husband, the scholar and editor Raymond Smith, and with her second, the distinguished Princeton neuroscientist Charlie Gross. But much of Oates''s prose centered on the pleasures of her home life, including her pet