made that Joyce Carol Oates (1938– ), with a career known for its excellence, popularity, and prolificacy, is the greatest living writer in the world to have not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (she has been regarded as a favorite by readers, critics, and bookies for about twenty-five years).
Born in Lockport, New York, in the northwestern part of the state, she began to write as a young child, attended Syracuse University on scholarship, and won a Mademoiselle magazine short story award at nineteen. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), has been followed by more than a hundred books, including more than fifty novels, forty short story collections, several books for children and young adult novels, ten volumes of poetry, fourteen collections of essays and criticism, and eight volumes of plays; eleven of her novels of suspense were released under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. An overwhelming number of her novels and short stories feature such subjects as violence, sexual abuse, murder, racial tensions, and class conflicts. Many of her fictional works have been based on real-life incidents, including violent crimes.
As voluminous as her writing career has been, so, too, has been the extraordinary number of major literary prizes and honors awarded to her, including a National Book Award for them (1969), as well as five other nominations; five Pulitzer Prize nominations; two O. Henry Awards for short stories; and Bram Stoker Awards for the novel Zombie (1995) and the short story “The Crawl Space” (2016). Among her bestselling books have been We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), which was an Oprah Book Club selection and a film released in 2002 with Beau Bridges and Blythe Danner, and Blonde (2000; 2001 film with Poppy Montgomery), a novel based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. The 1996 film Foxfire (starring Cathy Moriarty, Hedy Burress, and Angelina Jolie) was an adaptation of Oates’s 1993 novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.
“Extenuating Circumstances” was originally published in Sisters in Crime 5, edited by Marilyn Wallace (New York, Berkley, 1992).