The Gravedigger's Daughter

To escape Nazi persecution in Germany in 1936, the Schwart family emigrates to the United States, to a small town on the outskirts of New York. The father, a former high school teacher, is forced to take the only job he can find: he becomes a gravedigger and cemetery supervisor. Violent racist acts against the Schwart family in America in the 1940s make their survival even harder. Local prejudice and the emotional fragility of the Schwart family itself lead to an unimaginable tragedy, after which the gravedigger's daughter, Rebekah Schwart, is left an orphaned minor. After the tragedy, she begins her journey across America, drawn into an extraordinary and dangerous erotic odyssey, into a whirlwind of mystery and self-discovery. But while Rebekah tries to find her way in society, gaining legitimacy through marriage and motherhood, a harsh and inevitable past interferes one way or another. The Gravedigger's Daughter is a novel about identity and the challenges we face in order to triumph over our past and earn the acceptance of others.

The Gravedigger's Daughter is Joyce Carol Oates's 36th novel. The plot is based on the life of her grandmother. Oates explains that she decided to write about her family only after her parents died (in 2000 and 2003), adding that "the family history was filled with pockets of silence. I had to use a great deal of imagination to recreate it."

The Gravedigger's Daughter was published in 2007 and was included on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel was also a finalist, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates has written 56 novels, more than 30 short story collections, eight poetry collections, plays, countless essays and literary criticism. She is the winner of many literary awards, including the National Book Award (1969), the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, the Prix Femina (2005), the Commonwealth Award for distinguished service to literature (2003), the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award (2006), and others. Oates has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. The novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007) was classified as a bestseller on the New York Times list. For more than twenty-five years, Oates has been one of the most discussed candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

She has also written thriller/mystery novels under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.