In Invisible Writer, the first full-length, authorized biography of this complex and gifted writer, author and literary critic Greg Johnson examines the mysteries and myths that have attended Oates's remarkable career.

Granted privileged access to her private letters and journals, and drawing upon hundreds of extensive interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and Oates herself, Johnson develops his portrait of an "invisible writer" whose carefully guarded private world proves as fascinating as her well-publicized literary career.

Oates's own life was marked by the same chaos, violence, and dark twists of fate that would later beset her fictional characters and create her obsession with what she calls "the phantasmagoria of personality." Here is the child born into poverty in the desolate heart of upstate New York; a girl shadowed by emotional terrors; a young woman drawn at an early age into an intensely private world of the intellect and imagination.

We learn of her relationship with her autistic sister, Lynn, her mirror image - and a child without words; of her spectacular early success and subsequent conflicts with a sexist and hostile literary establishment; and of the near breakdown in the face of overwhelming media attention.