Description
A Garden of Earthly Delights follows Clara Walpole, a striking young woman whose life is shaped by the fault lines of American social class and by the private, often unsettling interior world of adolescence. As Clara moves through relationships and spaces that promise safety or status, her perceptions sharpen into something more ambiguous—tender, hungry, and increasingly haunted by what she cannot fully name. Joyce Carol Oates blends realist psychological intensity with a tense, expectant atmosphere, using everyday settings and charged encounters to reveal how desire, power, and belonging can distort a young life from the inside out. The novel is a probing study of class mobility, identity formation, and the ways innocence can be both protected and quietly dismantled.
Available Editions
paperback
Vanguard Press
Published Jan 1, 1967
440 pages
ISBN: 0814901719
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Details
First Published
1967
Language
eng
Content Warnings
No content warnings identified.