What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

The stunning, classic portrait of a powerful man's downward spiral to moral ruin

Jerome "Corky" Corcorn. A money-juggling wheeler dealer, rising politico, popular man's man, and successful womanizer. It is a Memorial Day weekend, and we are about to live with him, breathe with him, and sweat with him in a nonstop marathon of mounting desperation as he tries to keep his financial empire from unraveling, his love life from shredding, and his rebellious daughter from destroying both herself and him. Seldom in fiction has a man been brought so vividly to life in all his strength and weakness, hunger and ambition, carnality and corruption. Rarely has the complex web of American society been revealed so rivetingly. And never has one of today's supreme writers, Joyce Carol Oates, written a bolder and better novel than this mesmerizing masterpiece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062795847
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/23/2019
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	552,978
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

Another big novel from the prolific Oates, this tale of a successful middle-aged real estate developer whose hidden past surges up to wreak havoc on his present was one of PW's best books for 1994 and a PEN/Faulkner nominee. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Oates's latest novel is a big, breathless, complex, and sometimes painfully intense tale relating one man's every thought and move during the 1992 Memorial Day weekend. Corky Corcoran is a cocky, Irish Catholic, alcoholic, self-made millionaire as well as a city council member in Union City, New York. The turning point for Corky comes with the suicide of Marilee Plummer, a beautiful, politically ambitious black woman who had recently accused a black city council member of raping her. Even in his befuddled, alcoholic state, Corky wonders if his political friends had orchestrated Marilee's death and calls for a full investigation that antagonizes city government. Despite a somewhat contrived climax, Oates has created a remarkably detailed portrait of a man's life; however, Corky, an essentially stupid man whose actions are usually governed by his sexual or violent impulses, doesn't seem to merit such concentrated scrutiny. An interesting addition to Oates's body of work, this is recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/94.]-Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio

Library Journal

Jerome Corcoran hails from Irish Hill, a working-class community of Irish immigrants in fictitious Union City, New York, a medium-sized city on the banks of Lake Erie. When his father was murdered on the steps of their home in 1949, apparently because he took the unpopular stance that blacks should be allowed into the union, Jerome was the closest thing the police had to a witness. It was then that Jerome moved in with his aunt and uncle, for his mother developed severe emotional problems after the murder. Cut now to 1992, when Jeromenow Corkyis a liberal democrat, a city councilman moving up the ladder in local politics. Corky is comfortable with one hand around a drink and the other on a woman (though he never calls a woman a woman, usually it's the "c"-word), which was partly to blame for his divorce. He was thankful for having married, though, because it gave him access to his father-in-law, the local real-estate big shot, and a stepdaughter who would bring Corky immense pleasure and pain. In spite of Corky's strengthspower, connections to important people, a seemingly healthy income, good lookshe's a man haunted by the past, by his father's murder, by his mother's illness, by the paranoia that his friends still see him as a mick from the poor side of town. Oates, the chameleon that she is, delivers another novel utterly different from all her others. She has designed the modern tragedy: a bighearted hero with the tragic flaw of making bad decisions. Don't be fooled by the book's size, for though the narrative is long and raunchy it's also breathless and exciting. As with any other Oates work, expect high demand, and rightfully so.

Mary Frances Wilkens

A man on a tightrope that takes you to the edge...ambitious, audacious, masterly, and unforgettable.” — Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

A man on a tightrope that takes you to the edge...ambitious, audacious, masterly, and unforgettable.

Chicago Tribune

A man on a tightrope that takes you to the edge...ambitious, audacious, masterly, and unforgettable.

Chicago Tribune