Widely acknowledged for decades as one of America’s greatest and most honored writers, author Joyce Carol Oates released on June 17, the day after her 87th birthday, the novel Fox (Hogarth), a powerful and psychological whodunit crime thriller about the shocking disappearance of a charismatic teacher at an elite boarding school full of dark secrets.
New York Times bestselling novelist Rebecca Makkai, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, has called it Oates’s “most compelling book in her remarkable career.”
Remarkable to say the least.
A recipient of the National Humanities Medal and numerous other prestigious book and lifetime achievement awards, Oates has produced more than 60 novels over the last six decades, as well as dozens of short-story anthologies, poetry collections, and plays. Some of her bestselling novels include Blonde (2000), a fictional take on the life of actor Marilyn Monroe, and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), about the tragic fall from grace of a family in upstate New York.
According to the Lockport, New York, native, she owes her success in large part to Detroit.
From 1962 to 1968, while she was starting her writing career, Oates taught English at the University of Detroit while her husband, Ray Smith, taught English at Wayne State University.
The couple lived for the first year in an apartment just south of Palmer Park before buying a home in the Green Acres neighborhood (south of Eight Mile near Woodward) and later relocating to a larger residence in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood near Seven Mile and Livernois. A year after the 1967 Detroit rebellion, the couple took teaching positions at the University of Windsor and moved to a home in Windsor, Ontario, across from Belle Isle, where they remained until 1978 when the five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist began her distinguished teaching career at Princeton University.
During her time in the region, Oates was a regular contributor to the Detroit Free Press book page and a contributing editor for The Detroit News Sunday Magazine. She also developed numerous friendships with women in the city and suburbs, including renowned portrait artist and women’s rights advocate Patricia Hill Burnett.
In 1970, at the age of 31, two years before gracing the cover of Newsweek magazine, Oates first drew national attention when she received the National Book Award (beating out, among others, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five) for her gripping novel Them (1969), which addresses love, class, race, and inhumanity while chronicling the lives of a family living on the edge in the Motor City from the 1930s to 1967.
She also wrote other novels and short stories set in the Detroit area, including Expensive People (1968), Do with Me What You Will (1973), and Babysitter (2022).
Oates, the Roger S. Berlind ’52 distinguished professor of the humanities emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recently agreed to be interviewed by Hour Detroit via written questions and answers.
You once wrote: “Detroit, my ‘great’ subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am.” Why has Detroit been so important to you personally and professionally?
Detroit was the first real city in which I’d ever lived. Most of my life was spent in a rural setting/landscape; all of my fiction was in rural settings resembling my childhood in upstate/western New York. Moving to Detroit, purchasing a house, teaching at the University of Detroit — just overwhelming, life-transforming. Everything new, exciting, challenging.
You recently said in an interview that you love Detroit, so please tell me why.
“Love” must be an exaggeration — I scarcely know Detroit or anyone in Detroit any longer. But in my memory the city remains prominent. My husband taught at Wayne State University, and I was the lone woman — except for a visiting nun — in the English department at the Jesuit University of Detroit, an excellent school.
Where were some of the places you and your husband enjoyed going when you lived in the city, and what were some of the things you enjoyed doing?
I have very good memories of walking/biking through Palmer Park and Palmer Woods! Those were really happy times in our lives. We enjoyed visiting the Art Institute [Detroit Institute of Arts] and attending concerts there. But Ray and I also loved teaching and had many wonderful students and colleagues. Until the “civic disturbance” of July 1967, Detroit was a thriving, culturally exciting place to live.
What inspired you to write Them, and how important was it to you to write a novel set in Detroit that addressed social class, racism, good and evil, and family dysfunction — all of which seem to be very common themes for you?
This novel could only have been written in the aftermath of the so-called riot; it is an attempt to come to some sort of understanding of the sudden outburst of violence, the animosity between Black and white citizens. It was nostalgia mixed with a wish for a rational understanding of recent history and past history of racism, plus my ongoing interest in young Americans confronting the challenges of life in this country.
Did winning the National Book Award change your life, and did you feel added pressure to write the next great American novel?
No, I am not like that. I was much encouraged and grateful for a wider readership. I did have the idea to write a quartet of novels about young people in the U.S.: A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, Them, and Wonderland. Awards at young ages are especially appreciated.
What compelled you to write Babysitter, which is set in metro Detroit during the time of the Oakland County child killings that occurred just before you moved to Princeton? And why was it important to you to explore topics such as marriage, suburban life, and racism in the book, while giving voices to the victims?
This evolved into an exploration not only of child exploitation but of the societal enabling that protects many predators. But it is primarily a story of interlocking lives in an upscale suburban Detroit community, Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham, where many friends of ours lived.
Your latest book, Fox, a lengthy whodunit about the shocking disappearance of an elite boarding school teacher, has been called “spellbinding” and one of your best novels. Tell me about it.
This was an intricately plotted novel in a realistic setting of numerous lives interlocking — again, an exploration of how predators are protected by decent but credulous people. Fox is very carefully plotted and may show some evidence of my longtime interest in police procedurals and forensic science. The novel has a complicated ending. I believe that our lives are overwhelmingly complicated, though at a distance they may appear, to strangers, to be relatively straightforward.
How concerned are you about the more-recent banning of books?
Of course, I am opposed to book banning! It’s a sign of an authoritarian state. It is especially hypocritical on the part of our hypercensorious right wing since there is said to be highly toxic pornography available to young people online about which the book banners seem to be totally indifferent. Why focus on books when teenagers are on their phones constantly?
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
This story originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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