She was the first in her family to complete high school. Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper. Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter. This was love at first sight!' In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose 'influences remain very deep'. She became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as 'the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child. As a child, Oates’s next-door neighbor pled guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica Correctional Facility. Violence marred the lives of Oates and her recent ancestors: Oates's mother's biological father was murdered in 1917, which led to Oates mother's informal adoption and Oates's paternal grandmother survived, at age fourteen, an attempted murder-suicide at the hands of her own father. After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that Blanche's father had killed himself, and Blanche had subsequently concealed her Jewish heritage Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007). Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was 'very close' to Joyce. ) Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York, and characterized hers was 'a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status', but her childhood as 'a daily scramble for existence'. (Lynn Ann is severely autistic and institutionalized, and Oates has not seen her since 1971. Her brother, Fred Jr., and sister, Lynn Ann, were born in 19, respectively. She grew up on her parents' farm outside the town. Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina ( née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer.

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