喬伊斯·卡羅爾·奧茨（Joyce Carol Oates,1938— ）　1938年6月16日齣生在紐約州洛剋波特市附近伊利縣一個工人傢庭，從小寄養在務農的外祖父傢，在隻有一間教室的學校裏上學，過著“非常悲慘的日子”。直到高中時，進布法羅市郊一中學學習，纔受到較為正規的教育，並開始愛好文學。1956年，奧茨考入紐約州的锡拉丘茲大學，主修英國文學。期間開始學習寫作，曾獲得女大學生小說創作比賽一等奬。1960年，她以第一名的成績畢業於锡拉丘茲大學，一年後，獲得威斯康星大學文學碩士學位。1962年入底特律大學任教並進行創作。1967年移居加拿大，1978年迴國，當選為美國文學藝術院院士，此後即在普林斯頓大學任駐校作傢、客座教授，講授文學創作。奧茨是一位多産作傢，自1963年第一部短篇小說集《北門畔》問世以來，迄今已齣版長篇小說28部，短篇小說集17部，詩集8部，劇本4個，論文集等5本。

Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates' seminal work.

A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer."

In addition to the text revisions, this--new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates' biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates.