Oates was born in Lockport, New York, and grew up in the New York countryside. She attended the same one-room school her mother attended as a child.

Oates often remarks about receiving a copy of Alice in Wonderland when she was a little girl, and how it affected her life very deeply, growing up on a farm with very few books.

Oates taught at the University of Detroit, publishing her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, when she was twenty-six years old. Her novel them received the National Book Award in 1970. She then started teaching at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, right across the river from Detroit in 1968 to 1978. Since then she has published an average of two books a year, many of them novels. Frequent topics in her work include rural poverty, sexual abuse, class tensions, desire for power, female childhood and adolescence, and occasionally the supernatural.

Violence is a constant in her work, even leading Oates to have written an essay in response to the question, "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?" She is a fan of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, describing Plath's sole novel The Bell Jar as a "near perfect work of art"; but though Oates has often been compared to Plath, she disavows Plath's romanticism about suicide and among her characters, she favors cunning, hardy survivors, both women and men. Oates' concern with violence and other traditionally masculine topics has won her the respect of such male authors as Norman Mailer. She gained much attention for her book-length essay On Boxing. Oates has also written several books, mostly mystery novels, under the pen names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. She also taught at the University of Windsor in Canada for ten years before moving to Princeton in 1978.