Stories 1993: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Black Water 1995: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – What I Lived For 2001: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Blonde 2015: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories Nominated 1963: O. Henry Award – Special Award for Continuing Achievement (1970), five Second Prize (1964 to 1989), two First Prize (above) among 29 nominations 1968: National Book Award for Fiction – A Garden of Earthly Delights 1969: National Book Award for Fiction – Expensive People 1972: National Book Award for Fiction – Wonderland 1990: National Book Award for Fiction – Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart 1992: National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction – Black Water 1995: PEN/Faulkner Award – What I Lived For 2000: National Book Award – Blonde 2007: National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction – The Gravedigger's Daughter 2007: National Book Critics Circle Award, Memoir/Autobiography – The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973–1982 2013: Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories Personal life Oates met Raymond J. Smith, a fellow graduate student, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and they married in 1961. Smith became a professor of 18th-century literature and, later, an editor and publisher. Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds..." and "a very collaborative and imaginative marriage". Smith died of complications from pneumonia on February 18, 2008, and the death affected Oates profoundly. In April 2008, Oates wrote to an interviewer, "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really have very little energy [...] My marriagemy love for my husbandseems to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment." After six months of near suicidal grieving for Smith, Oates met Charles Gross, a professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, at a dinner party at her home. In early 2009, Oates and Gross were married. On April 13, 2019, Oates announced via Twitter that Gross had died at the age of 83. As a diarist, Oates began keeping a detailed journal in 1973, documenting her personal and literary life; it eventually grew to "more than 4,000 single-spaced typewritten pages". In 2008, Oates said she had "moved away from keeping a formal journal" and instead preserved copies of her e-mails. As of 1999, Oates remained devoted to