This was love at first sight!" In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose "influences remain very deep". She became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child. After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that Blanche's father had killed himself, and Blanche had subsequently concealed her Jewish heritage Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007). Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyce. Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York, and characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status", but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence". Her brother, Fred Jr., was born in 1943, and her sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely autistic, was born in 1956. She grew up on her parents' farm outside the town. Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina ( née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer.
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