Later in the night, Brock fatally shoots Bernie in the head. Loretta falls in love with Bernie Malin, and sleeps with him. The story begins with Loretta Botsford and her brother Brock as teenagers, living in the 1930s in a "fair-sized city on a midwestern canal". Them explores the complex struggles of American life through three down-on-their-luck characters-Loretta, Maureen, and Jules-who are attempting to reach normality and the American dream through marriage and money. At the time (1962–1967), Oates used the name of Joyce Smith. She wrote Maureen's letters, and the "Miss Oates" to whom the letters are written is also a fictional character. In an addendum to the afterword, Oates said that the "realist" element was a literary device: all characters and events were entirely fictional. She said that the confessional aspect was, at least temporarily, extremely therapeutic to "Maureen Wendall" and that all the family members were still living. Oates noted that, rather than sensationalizing the story of the Wendalls to make slum life more lurid, she softened some sections so that they would not overwhelm the reader. Saying that "the novel practically wrote itself," Oates organized the story and recast it as fiction, but at certain points she revised the text to include "Maureen Wendall's" words verbatim. The main character, "Maureen Wendall," contacted Oates by mail after she had failed a college course taught by the author, and these letters are included (presumably verbatim) in the novel, about two-thirds of the way through the text. In the book's foreword, Oates writes that them is based for the most part upon the life of a real family. Many years and many awards later, Oates surmised that them and Blonde (2000) were the works she will most be remembered for, and would most want a new reader to select, though she added that "I could as easily have chosen a number of titles." Genesis It was published by Vanguard in 1969 and it won the U.S. Them (stylized in all lowercase) is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the third in the Wonderland Quartet she inaugurated with A Garden of Earthly Delights.
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