Joyce Carol Oates, born in Lockport, New York, is one of America’s most prolific novelists, beginning in 1964 with the publication of her first novel, With Shuddering Fall. When photographed on March 6, 1970, her novel Them, about a family caught up in riot-stricken Detroit, had just won the National Book Award. In a “People Are Talking About …” feature of Vogue, the thirty-two year old Oates is described as “tentative, hush-voiced, with the fixed brown eyes of a sleepwalker.” “Most of my work” she is quoted, “is done in my head. When I sit down to write, it’s like recording something that is already there.” As a historical footnote, her session with Jack Robinson at his studio in Greenwich Village was interrupted by a loud explosion when a bomb being assembled by anti-war radicals the Weathermen exploded only two blocks away.