Joyce Carol Oates

Oates grew up on a small farm outside Lockport, New York, the first in her family to finish high school, and has cited both Faulkner's density and Dostoevsky's moral extremity as the writers who taught her fiction could hold anything.

Them, based partly on a former student's real life in Detroit, won the National Book Award when she was thirty-one and established the pattern that followed: violence, class, and gender examined at ferocious pace and volume across genres from gothic to campus novel to true-crime-adjacent fiction.

She has taught creative writing at Princeton for decades, married twice, and remains, well into her eighties, one of American letters' most active and most nominated-but-never-won Nobel contenders.