Joyce Carol Oates, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2010, will deliver the keynote address at the Second Biennial John Updike Society Conference in Boston on Tuesday, June 12, at 8 p.m. at host institution Suffolk University.
Like Updike, Oates has published in multiple genres (novel, short fiction, memoir, children’s books, plays, essays, criticism) and is considered one of the most important writers of her generation. She’s earned much praise and many awards for her fiction, including the PEN/Malamud Award and the O. Henry Prize for her achievements in short fiction, a National Book Award for her novel Them, and the 2004 Fairfax Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts.
When John Updike died, Oates posted a remembrance on The Book Bench of The New Yorker webpage in which she wrote, “I’ve been reading John’s work since I became an adult and can only content myself with the prospect of rereading his work through the remainder of my life.” She and John met a number of times, Oates recalled, and when he gave “a brilliant talk and reading at Princeton some years ago, I was pleased to introduce him to a large, packed auditorium. I teach his lovely short stories all the time—his language is luminous, sparkling, and glinting, with a steely sort of humor” and “some sense of the sacred seems to suffuse his work like that sort of sourceless sunshine which illuminates an overcast day.”
Oates, who has been compared to Updike on more than a few occasions—most recently when The Telegraph reviewer said her novel Middle Age “entered John Updike country” in a tale of “adultery and self-doubt among well-heeled East Coast Americans”—has written about Updike’s fiction on a number of occasions. When Rabbit at Rest was published, she reviewed it as “the most brooding, the most demanding, the most concentrated of John Updike’s longer novels,” lauding its “courageous theme—the blossoming and fruition of the seed of death we all carry inside us.”
Oates most recent publication is Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (2011), A Widow’s Story: A Memoir (2011), the novel In Rough Country (2010), and Sourland: Stories (2010). Born in upstate New York in 1938, Oates received her B.A. from Syracuse University in 1960 and her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. For many years she and her late husband Raymond Smith published The Ontario Review, a renowned literary magazine, and in 2000 she edited The Best American Essays of the Century. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.
Oates’ keynote address on Tuesday night will kick off the conference, with full days of panels, tours, and speakers scheduled for Wednesday, June 13 through Saturday, June 16. Further news about the conference and registration will be forthcoming.