Joyce Carol Oates
“During her long and distinguished career, Joyce Carol Oates never has shied away from the controversy that can come with using celebrities and tabloid news stories as the inspiration for her fiction,” Jon Michaud observes in the Washington Post. “Her novel Black Water (1992) drew on the Chappaquiddick incident; Blonde (2000) gave us Oates’s take on the life of Marilyn Monroe; and My Sister, My Love (2008) reimagined the murder of JonBenét Ramsey.