Like most important writers—Joyce, Proust, Mann—she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history.

Newsweek

The Rise of Life on Earth

Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the most notable books of 1991 and now available as a New Directions paperbook, Joyce Carol Oates’ The Rise of Life on Earth is a memorable portrait of one of the “insulted and injured” of American society. Set in the underside of working-class Detroit of the ’60s and ’70s, this short, intense novel sketches Kathleen Hennessy’s violent childhood and follows her into her early adult years as a hospital health-care worker. Overworked, underpaid, and quietly overzealous, Kathleen falls in love with a young doctor, whose exploitation of her sets the course of the remainder of her life, in which her passivity masks a deep fury and secret resolve to take revenge.

Paperback(published Sep, 01 1992)

ISBN
9780811212137
Price US
10.95

Clothbound(published Sep, 01 1992)

ISBN
9780811211710
Page Count
144

Joyce Carol Oates

Contemporary American Novelist

Like most important writers—Joyce, Proust, Mann—she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history.

Newsweek

Like most important writers––Joyce, Proust, Mann––she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history.

Walter Clemons, Newsweek