Author Joyce Carol Oates provided reflections on the lives and creative motivations of famous writers in a lecture Aug. 5 in Statler Hall.

Oates' 50-minute talk, "The Writer's (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration," was essentially notes from a work in progress on the psychological and environmental factors that shaped the work of such celebrated writers as Samuel Beckett, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"I've worked on this topic for years," Oates said. "It's really about all of us, living with rejection, dealing with being wounded, and how to remain inspired in spite of ourselves. … One is engaged in a continuous quest, making, unmaking and transforming the self. Woundedness, isolation and helplessness are at the core of creativity."

Emily Dickinson had an elegant writing style, but "underneath was resentment and anger," Oates said.

Hemingway's suicide at age 62 was almost predestined when his mother gave him the pistol his father had shot himself with.

Samuel Clemens grew up to become humorist Mark Twain, with a zest for entertaining in his speeches at gentlemen's clubs -- audiences of surrogates for his often-absent father, an itinerant judge, Oates said.

The Brontë sisters were motherless and "lived at the edge of the moors, in a very desolate place," she said. "They didn't have television, they didn't have the Internet. They did have books and magazines that came to the house, and they had one another, but most of all they had their extraordinary imaginations."

Anaïs Nin, "wounded by a father who left the family," became "infamous for her diaries, works of unusual frankness and intimacy."

Graham Greene was obsessive-compulsive, and so was his craft. "He set himself a goal of writing 500 words a day, no more, no less," Oates said. "He'd get to 500 and he'd stop right there.

"When you read the novels of Graham Greene, you're not reading words, you're reading sentences and scenes," she said. "Yet he put them together with the monomaniacal assiduousness of a demented bricklayer."

Fitzgerald, "the pre-eminent victim of early American excess, dropped out of Princeton at 23," she said. After his masterpiece "The Great Gatsby," "his successive novels were increasingly ignored."

While rejection slips and bad reviews can crush a writer's spirit, even glowing reviews can have profoundly negative effects, she said. Critics sometimes lie in wait for a second novel after an acclaimed debut, as she noted in the case of Norman Mailer and others.

Ralph Ellison became "the black spokesman for a generation" at age 38 with "Invisible Man," and he worked and reworked his second novel for years. "It got longer and longer until it became shapeless," she said.

Harper Lee, after debuting with "To Kill a Mockingbird," "never dared publish another book," Oates said. Lee observed, "when you are on top, there's nowhere to go but down."

Oates is author of more than 50 novels, 30 short-story collections and eight volumes of poetry. She joked that she had "written 40,000 novels."

"One cannot live without rejection -- rejection is a part of the learning process," she said. "As a young writer I sent out so many stories," it was akin to fishing with several lines in the water, she said. Her first published short story appeared in Cornell's literary magazine Epoch, so "Goldwin Smith Hall and Cornell loom very high in affecting my writing in a very positive way."

The lecture was sponsored by Cornell's School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions.