An epically prolific and moving novelist, a creative writing professor at Princeton, and mentor to many (past protégés including Jonathan Safran Foer, Richard Greenberg, and Jonathan Ames), and a constant New Yorker contributor, Oates is a literary legend whose fiction and non-fiction revel in the bleak and the violent.

Born in Lockport, New York in 1938 to a family of modest means, Oates was the first in her family to complete high school, showing she was already an overachiever. She then graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University and got her M.A. from U Wisconsin - Madison.

Her career took off almost immediately. Her first book was published in 1963 by Vanguard, when she was 25, and her second in 1964. The president of Vanguard, who met Oates when she had just graduated from U-Madison, later said she thought "she was a genius."

Her 1969 novel Them, published in 1969, won a National Book Award. She's been nominated for the Book Award twice more, and has earned upwards of 14 other awards spanning her 40-year career. She's been rumored to be "favored" for a Nobel in Literature for years, but that has prophecy has yet to come to pass.

Oates's first husband, Raymond Smith, whom she married in 1961, died in February of 2008. The death put a slight crimp in her otherwise legendary productivity (she reportedly writes in longhand for seven or eight hours every day [side note: ouch]), but in 2009 she married Charles Gross, a psychology professor at Princeton.

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