In 1938, Joyce Carol Oates was born in a rural farm town of Lockport, New York, where she spent her childhood. As a child, Oates frequently interacted with nature, allowing her to develop skills in vividly describing a scene. At the age of 14, Oates developed her passion for writing as her parents gifted her a typewriter, hoping that Oates would receive a proper education. As she moved onto higher education, Oates realized her talent in writing and even received an award in the “college short story” contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. As she spent her twenties in the 1950s and 1960s, she started to question the traditional gender role as society demanded sacrifices of women. She published numerous stories that challenged society, including “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and “Do with Me What You Will”. O’Connor’s social criticism literature especially influenced Oates’s belief, causing Oates’s writing style to resemble O’Connor’s so much that comparing the two is almost commonplace among scholarly writers. However, in the later interview, Oates revealed that although O’Connor impacted her, she tried to stay more secular in her writings. Along with being a professional writer, she taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She even received the National Humanities Medal in 2010 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.