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Portrait image of Joyce Carol Oates Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex (2023)

Sample of authors

Oates, Joyce Carol

American author, born into a Protestant working-class family in the little town of Lockport in the western part of the state of New York. The family had a difficult economic situation and she spent most of her childhood and adolescence with her paternal grandparents on a farm in Erie. As a child, she liked to read and write; she got her first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, from her g...

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Literary figures

Basil Willing

Gender: Male

Dr. Willing is the head of a psychiatric clinic in New York where he is often hired by, for example, the FBI to solve complex murder mysteries in thrillers and whodunits by Helen McCloy. Several are crime classics. Willing’s mother is Russian and his father American, and he has a man servant by the name of Juniper. After many years as a bachelor he eventually marries and Austrian woman, Gisela v...

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