The Vanguard Press published Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was 26 years old. In 1966, she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and written after listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."[11] The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson".[12] The story was frequently anthologized and was adapted into the 1985 film Smooth Talk, starring Laura Dern. In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?".[13] Another noted early short story, "In a Region of Ice" (1967), dramatizes the drift into protest against the world of education and sober, established society of his parents, depression and eventual murder-cum-suicide act of a young, gifted Jewish-American student. Like a number of other novels and short stories in her body of work, this was inspired by a real-life incident, and Oates had been acquainted with the model of her protagonist. She revisited this subject in the title story of her collection Last Days (1985).

Oates's novel them (1969) received the National Book Award in 1970; it is set in Detroit during a time span from the 1930s to the 1960s, most of it in black ghetto neighborhoods, and deals openly with crime, drugs, and racial/class conflicts. Again, some of the key characters and events were based on real people whom Oates had known or heard of during her years in the city. Since then she has published an average of two books a year. Frequent topics in her work include rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, female childhood and adolescence, and occasionally the supernatural. Violence is a constant in her work, even leading Oates to have written an essay in response to the question, "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?" In 1990 she discussed her novel, Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart, which also deals with themes of racial tension, and described “the experience of writing [the novel]” as “so intense it seemed almost electric”.[14] She is a fan of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, describing Plath's sole novel The Bell Jar as a "near perfect work of art"; but though Oates has often been compared to Plath, she disavows Plath's romanticism about suicide and among her characters, she favors cunning, hardy survivors, both women and men.[citation needed] Oates' concern with violence and other traditionally masculine topics has won her the respect of such male authors as Norman Mailer. In the early 1980s, Oates began writing stories in the Gothic and horror genres; in her foray into these genres, Oates said she was "deeply influenced" by Kafka and felt "a writerly kinship" with James Joyce.[15]

In 1996, Oates published We Were the Mulvaneys, a novel following the disintegration of an American family, which became a best-seller after being selected by Oprah's Book Club in 2001.[13] In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oates wrote several books, mostly mystery novels, under the pen names "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly."

What about this author? Any good?

M.G.

This is the first book I've read by her. I am enjoying it very much and plan to read more. I think she is a great author.