I Lock My Door Upon Myself: A Novella - Softcover

Award-winning author, Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 and grew up in upstate New York.While a scholarship student at Syracuse University, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. She graduated as valedictorian, then earned an M.A. at the University of Wisconsin. In 1968, she began teaching at the University of Windsor. In 1978, she moved to New Jersey to teach creative writing at Princeton University, where she is now the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.

A prolific writer, Joyce Carol Oates has produced some of the most controversial, and lasting, fiction of our time. Her novel, them, set in racially volatile 1960s Detroit, won the 1970 National Book Award. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart focused on an interracial teenage romance. Black Water, a narrative based on the Kennedy-Chappaquiddick scandal, garnered a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and her national bestseller Blonde, an epic work on American icon Marilyn Monroe, became a National Book Award Finalist. Although Joyce Carol Oates has called herself, "a serious writer, as distinct from entertainers or propagandists," her novels have enthralled a wide audience, and We Were the Mulvaneys earned the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list.

As in her recent highly praised novel, Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart , Oates unfolds another tale of ill-starred love between a white woman and a black man. The narrator tells the story of her grandmother, Edith Freilicht, whose secret name was Calla (with its overtones of lily-whiteness). It was bestowed by her own mother, dead in childbirth, and recognized only by her black lover, muscular, charismatic Tyrell Thompson, whose mysterious trade as a dowser (one who finds water with a divining rod) brings him unbidden to her family's New York farm. Set around the turn of the century, this exquisitely crafted, dreamlike novella is the first in Ecco's planned series of fictions on art. In it the author imaginatively fashions her own meaning for Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff's painting of the same title (which serves as the cover illustration): the work depicts a striking young woman who leans on a window ledge and fixes pale bewitching eyes on the beholder; a flower stands in the foreground. Windows figure prominently throughout the narrative, as invitations to adventure, openings upon dangerous perspectives, frames for catastrophes. Images of water illuminate the lovers' fates. Oates powerfully creates a hallucinatory and harrowing atmosphere charged with sensuality and destruction.
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