Blonde

One of America’s most acclaimed novelists boldly re-imagines one of America’s most enduring icons in Blonde —the National Book Award-nominated bestseller by Joyce Carol Oates. 

In her most ambitious work to date, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker -- the child, the woman, the fated celebrity and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist -- intensely conflicted and driven -- who had lost her way. A powerful portrait of Hollywood's myth and an extraordinary woman's heartbreaking reality, Blonde is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great twentieth-century American star.

"A self-described "distilled" life in the form of fiction, Blonde tells only the backbone of Monroe’s rags-to-rags story, discarding with much of the historical Marilyn in an apparent attempt to see her anew... Oates clearly had to choose a radical approach if she was to have any hope of a fresh understanding of the girl behind the woman behind the necktie. And once the reader stops obsessing about which details are true (albeit with difficulty), it’s easy to get sucked in by this no-fail American nightmare story."  -  Jill Eisenstadt, The Boston Review

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.