Oates, Joyce Carol

American author, born into a Protestant working-class family in the little town of Lockport in the western part of the state of New York. The family had a difficult economic situation and she spent most of her childhood and adolescence with her paternal grandparents on a farm in Erie. As a child, she liked to read and write; she got her first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, from her grandmother and it was a great inspiration for her. At the age of fourteen, she was given a typewriter and she started using that to try writing novels.