Because it is bitter, and because it is my heartbyJoyce Carol Oates

Because it is bitter and because it is my heart (1990) is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates.  In the nobel, Oates examines race relations and violence in America through the experiences of a black teenager and his white friend from 1956 to 1963.

The novel is a part of series of novels by Oates that covers different aspects of American society. The novel's theme is racism. It was be preceded by American Appetites (1989), on affluence; I Lock the Door on Myself (1990), about alienation. It would be followed by The Rise of Life on Earth (1991), dealing with poverty; Heat (1991), on class; and Black Water (1992), about gender politics.

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Product Description
Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning novel of violence and love. At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man. Iris is the only witness to the crime. The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries keep people apart-or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder ... and a bond of passion and guilt is formed between them. How this one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies becomes Joyce Carol Oatesrsquo; finest, emotion-packed novel-a work the critics are calling a masterpiece, the best work of Americarsquo;s best writer of contemporary realism.
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From Dust Jacket - by way of Celestial Timepiece
Joyce Carol Oates is in full fire here. The motifs and themes of this rich, intricately textured realistic novel belong to the American experience of the 1950s and 1960s. But the vision of the life that animates them is so clear and unflinching that the past comes to us with the force of revelation. Once again, to read a new Oates novel is to enter a new world.

In a small city in upstate New York, in the decade before the upsurge of the civil rights movement, when racial prejudice seemed inflexible and habitual, we are introduced to two families struggling to advance themselves—the Courtneys, who are white, and the Fairchilds, who are black. The invisible color line separates them; each family is secure (or so it seems) in its own world, but there is a strange, virtually subterranean link. When Iris Courtney is a young girl, she is the only witness to a murderous street fight between Jinx Fairchild and a white man who has threatened her. A bond of passion and guilt is formed between the two—at first unstated, then slowly, year by year, gathering force until it must inevitably declare itself, and the consequences are fateful. Parallel to this story of extraordinary passion are the lives and struggles of the two families: like mirror images of each other, and of the country in which they live, each moves from a time of high promise to an age of embittered violence. Tragic and enthralling, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is one of Joyce Carol Oates's most significant achievements.