I first encountered Joyce Carol Oates in person when I heard her in conversation with Richard Ford last spring. Though I was only watching from the audience, I left the event feeling stirred: she had a voice I recognized. It seemed to be the voice of truth. While onstage, she openly confessed to her struggle with reading her work to an audience and explained that she had tried several tactics for bearing through: reading from the beginning, reading a central passage, or, as was the case on this evening, reading the end of her novel Mudwoman.

Oates’s work is vast—a prolificacy that flowers from her rigorous approach, fed by her pleasure in writing. She has published over fifty novels, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, children’s books, and essays. Her first was the novel With Shuddering Fall, published in 1964, when she was twenty-six. She is now seventy-four, and in her steady career she has won many awards, including the National Book Award (for Them, in 1970) and numerous honorary degrees, fellowships, and nominations. Since 1978, she has taught creative writing at Princeton University. And though I cannot pretend to have read all her work, or even most of it, what I have read consistently reveals her intelligence, courage, and willful awareness, which she uses in the service of both challenging and embracing American society.