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    A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Them"
    A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Them"
    A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Them"
    Ebook42 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Them"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Them," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535840774
    A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Them"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Them" - Gale

      1

      Them

      Joyce Carol Oates

      1960

      Introduction

      them is a story about urban life in America, centered on the experiences of a mother, Loretta, and her children Jules and Maureen. In the Author's Note at the beginning of the book, Joyce Carol Oates explains that she based one of the characters, Maureen Wendall, on a young woman who had been her student at the University of Detroit, and indeed chapters eight and nine of the middle part of the book consist of letters written by Maureen to a former instructor whom she addresses Dear Miss Oates. Whatever the source that inspired the events in this book, it is highly unlikely that all of the events in the Wendall family's life between 1937 and 1967 could be drawn from any one person's experiences. This presentation of the story as history in fiction form does, however, help readers believe that all of the details that are rendered in graphic brutality are true to what life in the poorest of urban areas must have been like.

      them is actually the final installment of a trilogy about life in various settings within American society. The first novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), follows forty years in the life of a farm family. The second, Expensive People (1967), examines the world of suburbia and the values that are held and lost there. The urban world depicted in them is so vicious to love and prone to random violence that in there is no peace to be found by its protagonists, Maureen and Jules Wendall, the siblings who have been hardened by city life: they leave to pursue empty dreams in California and suburban Detroit.

      Author Biography

      Joyce Carol Oates is widely recognized as one of America's most active writers, having published dozens of novels, poetry collections, short story collections, dramas, and essays. She was born in 1938, the same year as Jules Wendall of them, and she grew up in the rural countryside on the outskirts of Lockport, New York, attending a one-room school during her primary education. After receiving a typewriter at age fourteen, she wrote novel after novel throughout high school and college. Oates attended Syracuse University on a scholarship, graduating as class valedictorian in 1960, and the following year she earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin. From 1961 to 1967 she lived in Detroit and taught at the University of Detroit, a time that she cites as an inspiration, not just for them, but for the rest of her writing career: Detroit, my 'great' subject, she wrote in the essay Visions of Detroit,

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