Word: novels
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...difference between heroes and most people is that heroes have destinies, while most people have only ambitions. With some fine adjustments for human limitations, Joyce Carol Gates demonstrates her intuitive grasp of this fact in Them, the latest novel in what has now become an informal trilogy about people's frantic attempts to free themselves from the complexities of American life...
Joyce Carol Gates' pains, it turns out, were quite personal. As a teacher at the University of Detroit from 1962 to 1967, she first met the "Maureen Wendell" of the novel. She had been a student whom Miss Gates was forced to flunk for an inability to express herself. A few years later "Maureen" wrote Miss Gates an eloquent, obsessional letter about her sense of personal destiny...
...story of the "Wendells." "Their lives pressed upon mine eerily," says Miss Gates, "so that I began to dream about them instead of about myself, dreaming and redreaming their lives. Because their world was so remote from me, it entered me with tremendous power, and in a sense the novel wrote itself...
...clang and danger. Living in Canada, the Smiths remain almost entirely American in their concerns. Joyce Carol-though she is against the Viet Nam war -has little sympathy with the kind of radical who, she feels, confuses personal frustrations with public problems. A minor character in her latest novel defines the type perfectly. She has small patience, too, with intellectuals who find her work too full of social and economic themes. "The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward," she says. "Intellectuals have forgotten, or else they never understood, how difficult...
...grew up outside of Lockport, a small city in western New York State. In a one-room schoolhouse, Joyce Carol's writer's reflex quickly asserted itself. She cannot recall a time when she was not setting down or thinking about a story. Her first submitted novel -250 pages devoted to a dope addict redeemed by getting a black stallion-was rejected by a New York publisher as too depressing for the 15-year-old market. Joyce Carol quietly accepted the verdict, though she was in a better position to judge. She was 15 years...