A garden of earthly delights.byJoyce Carol Oates

A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) is Joyce Carol Oates's second novel. It is the first book of "The Wonderland Quartet."

The book follows one Clara Walpole’s ill-fated life and the four men who shaped it. Clara’s father, a bitter migrant farm worker, Lowry, who whisks the teenage Clara away and tempts her with love, Revere, a wealthy married business man who gives Clara stability and Swan, Clara’s son who carries the physiological burden of Clara’s determination to escape her haphazard existence of violence and poverty.

For a recent Modern Library edition of the novel, Oates revised three-quarter of the original published version of the novel.

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From Book Jacket
In her second novel, Joyce Carol Oates created one of her most memorable heroines, Clara, the beautiful daughter of migrant farmworkers. Intent upon rising above her haphazard life of violence and poverty, Clara struggles for independence while relying on four men to fashion her destiny: her father, a hardened laborer simmering with resentment; Lowry, who rescues the teenage Clara from her family and offers her a first glimpse of love; Revere, the wealthy married man who promises Clara stability; and Swan, Clara's son, who bears the burden of his mother's mistaken identity.

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Product Description
In this stirringly powerful novel, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of Clara, child of a migrant worker, and the four men who shape her life: Carleton, her father, for whom she is life's only meaning; Lowry, with whom she runs away at fourteen and whose child she bears; Revere, the man she marries and who gives her a name; and Swan, her son, who is devoured by her hunger for possession.

Born into a deprived and grueling world, a world of transience, Clara's only certainty is uncertainty; her only goal, to arrange fate, to wage war on chance and accident. The violence of that war is told by Miss Oates with the compelling fascination that so marks her work. It is a fascination akin to that of the great painting from which the novel's title derives: "The Garden of Earthly Delights" in which the pleasures of the flesh are extolled, but with the full consciousness of their sin; a garden in which sweetness is as devilish as decay.

Miss Oates, whose exceptional talent has already been so widely recognized, depicts her garden with the force of a master.