Joyce Carol Oates By Rachel Haynie

National best–selling author and recipient of the National Book Award Joyce Carol Oates read from her own memoir at Thomas Cooper Society’s annual dinner last week. The Face of a Writer: Life, Craft, and Art was published in 2003.

The Princeton University professor, who has written some of most enduring fiction of the times, was in Columbia to receive the Thomas Cooper Medal. The medal was inaugurated in 1995 in recognition of distinction in the arts and sciences. Oates joins the ranks of James Dickey, George Plimpton, Ray Bradbury, Joseph Heller, John Jakes, William Styron, Derek Walcott, and Matthew Bruccoli, all previous recipients.

Oates engaged society members with recollections of her early school years in an up–state New York one–room school. She shared her affinity for wooden pencil boxes and the smell of Crayons. Lingering odors of her lunch pail and the wax paper in which her food was wrapped were just as enduring, but not as pleasant. These she mentioned along with the years of teasing she attributed to “boys being boys.”

She recalled fondly the first library she knew. “It was only a shelf of books,” said Oates. That shelf in her schoolroom kept company with desks on which history was etched. “Penmanship was given more importance in those days.”

Recent bestsellers Oates authored are We Were the Mulvaneys in 1996 and Blonde in 2000.

The Thomas Cooper Society reveres literature in the name of USC’s second president for whom the main library is named.