乔伊斯·卡罗尔·奥茨（Joyce Carol Oates,1938— ）　1938年6月16日出生在纽约州洛克波特市附近伊利县一个工人家庭，从小寄养在务农的外祖父家，在只有一间教室的学校里上学，过着“非常悲惨的日子”。直到高中时，进布法罗市郊一中学学习，才受到较为正规的教育，并开始爱好文学。1956年，奥茨考入纽约州的锡拉丘兹大学，主修英国文学。期间开始学习写作，曾获得女大学生小说创作比赛一等奖。1960年，她以第一名的成绩毕业于锡拉丘兹大学，一年后，获得威斯康星大学文学硕士学位。1962年入底特律大学任教并进行创作。1967年移居加拿大，1978年回国，当选为美国文学艺术院院士，此后即在普林斯顿大学任驻校作家、客座教授，讲授文学创作。奥茨是一位多产作家，自1963年第一部短篇小说集《北门畔》问世以来，迄今已出版长篇小说28部，短篇小说集17部，诗集8部，剧本4个，论文集等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.