Joyce Carol Oates B. 1938

MARY HIGGINS CLARK b. 1929

Mary Higgins Clark was born on December 24, 1929 and raised in New York She is of Irish descent. Her father died when she was ten leaving her mother with three children to raise. After graduating from high school Mary went to secretarial school so she could help her mother with the family finances. Soon afterwards she became a stewardess and satisfied her thirst for traveling.

She married her neighbour whom she had known since she was sixteen, but was left a young widow with five children by the death of her husband, Warren Clark, from a heart attack in 1964. She had put all her energy into her children's education.

Mary Higgins Clark's literary activity began with writing radio scripts. Her first book was a biographical novel about the life of George Washington, Aspire to the Heavens. It was followed by a suspense novel Where Are the Children?, which became a bestseller and marked a turning Point in her life and career.

In 1974 Mary Higgins Clark decided to catch up on her own education entering Fordham University at Lincoln Center and graduated from it with B.A. in philosophy in 1979.

Since then she has won many honorary doctorates and other honours, among them The Women of Achievement, Irish Woman of the Year, the Gold Medal of Honor from the American-Irish Historical Society, the Spirit of Achievement Award from the Albert Einstein College of. Medicine of Yeshiva University, and the National Arts Club's first Gold Medal in Education. Mary Higgins Clark was made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, a Dame of Malta, and a Dame of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem. She was awarded the Grand Prix de Literature of France in 1980.

Her bestsellers following Where Are the Children? are: A Stranger is Watching (1978), The Cradle-Will Fall (1980), A Cry in the Night (1982), Stillwatch (1984), Weep No More My Lady (1987), While My Pretty One Sleeps (1989), The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories (1989), Loves Music, Loves to Dance (1991), All Around the Town (1992), I'll Be Seeing You (1993), Remember Me (1994), The Lottery Winner: Alvirah and Willy Stories (1994), Le$ Me Call You Sweetheart (1995), Silent Night (1995), Moonlight Becomes You (1996), My Gal Sunday (1996), Pretend You Don't See Her (1997).

Joyce Carol Oates, born in Lockport, New York, is one of the most prolific writers of the second half of the twentieth century. She published many novels and collections of stories and has written numerous poems, plays, and critical essays, and she shows few signs of slowing her output. She published over sixty books since her first appeared in 1964. Her books - whether novels, books of poems, collections of stories, or nonfiction memoirs on subjects like boxing - always draw serious critical attention and more often than not land on the bestseller lists, and she has even written suspense novels pseudonymously as Rosamond Smith. Her works possess a great amount of energy and intensity.

Born in Lockport, New York, she holds degrees from Syracuse and the University of Wisconsin, and she is writer-in-residence at Princeton University, where she also codirects, with her husband, the Ontario Review Press.

She began writing at an early age. Her first book With Shuddering Fall was published in 1964. Since then, she produced novels, collections of stories, and volumes of poetry at a rapid pace. Her works of fiction include Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970), The Assassins (1975), Do With Me What You Will (1978), The Seduction and Other Stories (1980), Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmore Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthum (1984). Them (1968), a novel of African-American life in Detroit, won a National Book Award in 1970.

Oates's work is often violent, a fact for which she has been criticized on numerous occasions. In response, she has remarked that these comments are "always ignorant, always sexist," implying that different standards are often applied to the work of women authors whose realism may be too strong for some tastes.

Oates is known as one of the most distinguished story writers of America. Among the collections of stories are The Hungry Ghosts (1974), The Goddess and Other Women (1974), The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975), Crossing the Border (1976).

Herstory Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, which is based on a story about a serial rapist and killer known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson", was filmed in 1985. Indicating the long popularity of this story, Oates published a collection of prose pieces in 1999 titledWhere I've Been, Where I'm Going?

She is also the author of collections of poetry, Angel Fire (1973), The Fabulous Beasts (1975), Love and Its Derangements and Other Poems (1977). She has received numerous awards for her work.

Her thirtieth novel, Blonde (2000), took as its subject the life of Marilyn Monroe.

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