"them" by Joyce Carol Oates

them is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, published in 1969 by Vanguard Press. Set explicitly in Detroit, the novel follows the Wendall family across three decades, from the 1930s through the 1967 Detroit riots, tracing the cycles of poverty, violence, and fractured hope that define their lives. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970.^[1] Critics recognized it as one of the most unflinching portraits of working-class American life published in the twentieth century, and it remains a central text in both Oates scholarship and the American urban novel tradition.

Background and Composition

Oates wrote them while living and teaching in the Detroit area. She joined the faculty of the University of Detroit in 1961 and later taught at the University of Windsor across the river in Ontario, a position she held until 1978.^[2] Her years in Detroit gave her direct exposure to the city's working-class neighborhoods, its racial tensions, and the grinding economic pressures that would shape the novel's world. She has described Detroit as one of the most powerful influences on her fiction.

The novel grew, in part, from a real encounter. In the author's note that prefaces them, Oates writes that a student she identifies only as "Maureen Wendall" shared her family's history with Oates in a series of letters and conversations. Oates presents this as the seed of the novel, positioning herself as a character within the text — a professor named "Miss Oates" — and framing the story as a fictionalized account of true events. This device complicates the novel's status as pure fiction, incorporating autobiographical and documentary elements that place it in an unusual position between realism and autofiction. The author's note reads in part: "This is a work of history in fictional form — that is, in personal perspective, which is the only kind of history that exists."^[3]

The late 1960s were a period of acute social crisis in the United States. Civil rights legislation had passed, but enforcement remained contested and violent. Anti-war protest was intensifying. Detroit itself had been the site of one of the deadliest urban uprisings in American history: the 1967 Detroit riot, which left 43 people dead, more than 1,000 injured, and vast stretches of the city burned.^[4] Oates finished them in the aftermath of that event, and the riots appear directly in the novel's final section. The novel's publication in 1969 placed it squarely within a national conversation about urban inequality, race, and the limits of the American Dream.

Plot

them is divided into three parts, each named for its central character. The novel opens in the late 1930s with Loretta Botsford, a teenager living in a Detroit neighborhood who witnesses a murder in her bed — her boyfriend is shot by her brother — and whose life pivots irreversibly from that moment. She marries Howard Wendall, a man ill-suited to stability, and they begin producing children: Jules, Maureen, and Betty. Howard drifts through jobs and moods; Loretta drifts through men. The family moves repeatedly through Detroit's poorer districts, never finding footing.

The second part centers on Maureen, Loretta's daughter, who becomes perhaps the novel's most internally rendered character. Maureen is studious and desperate to escape the family's disorder, but she is drawn into prostitution as a teenager to save money for a life she imagines elsewhere. When her stepfather, Furlong, discovers her savings, he beats her so severely she retreats into a catatonic state for nearly a year. It is during her recovery that she begins writing letters to a professor — Miss Oates — which form one of the novel's structural pillars.

Jules, Loretta's son, drives the third section. He's charming, restless, and drawn to the idea of transformation. He falls into criminal activity, survives violence, falls in love with a woman named Nadine who shoots him and then herself, and eventually emerges as a participant in the 1967 Detroit riots. The riots are portrayed not as political awakening but as a kind of inevitable eruption — the city burning because there was nothing left to hold it together. Jules survives and moves to California. Maureen, by the novel's end, has married a married man to extract herself from Detroit, slipping into a suburban life with deliberate, almost cold calculation. Neither escape is triumphant. Both carry the weight of everything that came before.

Characters

Loretta Wendall is the novel's matriarch and its opening narrator. She's vivid, impulsive, and often infuriating — a woman who survives by adapting rather than resisting. Her choices consistently harm her children, though she's rarely aware of this. She functions, in part, as a portrait of a certain kind of American optimism: cheerful, shallow, and ultimately unable to reckon with the consequences of her own life.

Jules Wendall is Loretta's eldest son. He embodies the American myth of self-invention — the young man who believes he can talk or hustle his way into a better life. Oates tracks his ambitions from adolescence through the riots, and his arc suggests that the myth itself is the problem: that the belief in individual reinvention blinds Jules, and people like him, to the structural conditions that constrain them.

Maureen Wendall is arguably the novel's moral and psychological center. Her sections are the most inward, the most precise, and the most disturbing. Her eventual escape into suburban domesticity has been read by critics both as a form of survival and as a kind of spiritual defeat — she gets out, but what she becomes is its own kind of diminishment.^[5]

Miss Oates appears as a character within the novel, primarily in Maureen's letters. Her presence is deliberately ambiguous — she's at once a confessor figure, a representative of a world the Wendalls can't access, and a reminder that the story is being shaped and filtered by someone outside the family's experience.

Detroit Setting

them is set entirely in Detroit and its immediate surroundings. The city isn't simply backdrop — it's a structural force in the novel, shaping what the characters can imagine for themselves. Oates traces the family's geography across Detroit's working-class west-side neighborhoods, through rooming houses and cramped apartments, past shuttered factories and corner bars. The physical decline of the city over the novel's thirty-year span mirrors the family's own inability to gain traction.

The 1967 Detroit riots occupy the final movement of the novel and represent its most directly historical passage. Oates depicts the fires and the chaos not through the eyes of officials or journalists but through Jules, who moves through the burning streets with a kind of exhilaration he can't entirely explain. The riots in the novel are presented as the logical outcome of decades of displacement, poverty, and containment — not an aberration but a culmination.^[6]

Detroit was undergoing significant deindustrialization during the period the novel covers. The postwar boom had drawn hundreds of thousands of workers to the city's auto plants, but by the late 1950s and 1960s, automation and suburban relocation of manufacturing had begun hollowing out those jobs. The white flight that followed white working-class families into the suburbs left behind increasingly segregated and economically isolated neighborhoods. The Wendalls exist in the middle of this process — white and poor enough that they don't benefit from the racial geography of suburbanization, stuck in neighborhoods that the city's economic logic was abandoning.^[7]

Reception

them received strong reviews on publication. The novel was named among the New York Times Best Books of the Year for 1969.^[8] In 1970, it won the National Book Award for Fiction, one of American publishing's most prestigious honors. The award citation recognized the novel's ambition and its willingness to confront the realities of American poverty and urban life without sentimentality.^[9]

Scholarly reception has been substantial. Joanne V. Creighton, in her 1979 study of Oates' fiction, identified them as the culmination of what she called Oates' "Detroit trilogy," noting that the novel achieved a synthesis of social realism and psychological intensity that Oates' earlier work had been building toward.^[10] Eileen Teper Bender's Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence (1987) examined the role of Oates' Detroit years in shaping the novel's geography and politics, arguing that the city's specific character — its industrial heritage, its racial divisions, its particular relationship to the American myth of mobility — was essential to the novel's meaning rather than incidental to it.^[11]

The novel's reputation has held. In 2026, it appeared on the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction, introduced to a new generation of readers alongside contemporary fiction.^[12]

Themes

The novel's central preoccupation is entrapment — the question of whether individuals born into poverty and violence can actually escape, or whether escape is itself a kind of illusion. Each of the three Wendall children attempts to break free. None of them fully succeeds. Jules gets out of Detroit but carries the city's violence with him. Maureen escapes into domesticity, but what she leaves behind is the question of who she might have been. Loretta never really tries to escape — she adapts, survives, and doesn't notice what's been lost.

Violence runs through the novel not as spectacle but as atmosphere. It's domestic, routine, and largely unpunished. Men hit women. Women absorb it or redirect it. Children learn that the world is a place where bodies are vulnerable and justice is theoretical. This isn't exaggerated — Oates is precise about it, and the precision is what makes it hard to dismiss.

The novel also takes seriously the question of women's lives in mid-century America. Loretta and Maureen both find themselves constrained by the same basic reality: their options are defined by the men available to them. Marriage, for both of them, is less a romantic institution than a survival strategy. Oates doesn't romanticize this or editorialize about it — she simply shows it, repeatedly, until the pattern becomes undeniable.^[13]