Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in Lockport, New York. She started writing very young and that the age of fifteen she submitted her first novel, but it was rejected for being “too dark”. This style of writing is common on many of her works including “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates graduated from Syracuse University and then went on to get her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin. Oates “turned much often in her writing to everyday characters, which she often placed in si