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 By the North Gate
by Joyce Carol Oates
New York: Vanguard, 1963
253 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
BY THE NORTH GATE introduces a new young American writer of singular talent. In her first collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates that she is both vital and sensitive—sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, often violent, but always a writer with something to say and the tools with which to say it.
Because Miss Oates is young, her stories concern themselves with problems and situations that youth knows: the conflict between the hope of the young and the pessimism of the old; the realization of the injustices of the civilized order; the horror of the senseless cruelty condoned by society; the reality of evil, existing even in the good and the loving; brutality without motivation—the ultimate horror; the senseless machinations of fate that condition all of life. And, above all, man standing at the North Gate—the boundary between civilization and wilderness, both borne in his heart—and striving toward the victory which he is capable.
Within a framework of realism, in a world of sex and blood, of poverty and poetry, Miss Oates's characters live their passions in stories that have already brought their brilliant young author two awards, won places in the O. Henry Awards Anthology and Martha Foley's The Best American Short Stories 1963, as well as publication in the Southwest Review, the Colorado Quarterly, and Mademoiselle.
Contents
Swamps
The Census Taker
Ceremonies
Sweet Love Remembered
Boys at a Picnic
Pastoral Blood
An Encounter With the Blind
Images
Edge of the World
A Legacy
In the Old World
The Fine White Mist of Winter
The Expense of Spirit
By the North Gate
Excerpt
From "The Fine White Mist of Winter"
Some time ago in Eden County the sheriff's best deputy, Rafe Murray, entered what he declared to the sheriff, and to his own wife and man-grown sons, and to every person he encountered for a month, white or black, to be his second period—his new period, he would say queerly, sucking at his upper lip with a series of short, damp, deliberate noises. He was thirty-eight when he had the trouble with Bethl'em Aire, he would say, thirty-eight and with three man-grown sons behind him; but he had had his eyes opened only on that day; he was born on that day; he meant to keep it fresh in his mind. When the long winter finally ended and the roads were thick and shapeless with mud, shot with sunlight, the Negro Bethl'em and his memory had both disappeared from Eden County, and—to everyone's relief, especially his wife's—from Murray's mind too. But up until then, in those thick, gray, mist-choked days, he did keep what had happened fresh in his mind; memories of the fine driving snow that fell on that particular day, and of his great experience, seemed to recur again and again in his thoughts.
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Reviews
- Saturday Review, October 26, 1963, p45
- New York Times Book Review, November 10, 1963, p4, 61
- Book Week, November 17, 1963, p32
- Library Journal, December 15, 1963, p4873
- Time, January 3, 1964, p80
- Books Abroad, Summer 1964, p313
- Epoch, Winter 1964, p171-172
Epigraph
By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers to watch out the barbarous land.
By RIHAKU, 8th century A.D.,
Translated by Ezra Pound
(From "Lament of the Frontier Guard")
Awards
- New York Times Notable Books of the Year
- Best American Short Stories, 1963: "The Fine White Mist of Winter"
- Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1963: "The Fine White Mist of Winter"
- Mademoiselle College Fiction Contest, 1959 winner: "In the Old World"
Note
JCO's first book
Other Editions
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Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/stories/gate.html
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