Over the course of one feverish Memorial Day weekend, Joyce Carol Oates follows Jerome “Corky” Corcoran — businessman, property dealer, political operator, compulsive womaniser and thoroughly American believer in the possibility of getting away with things.

However, as we soon come to realise, Corky has spent his life converting appetite into momentum, and suddenly momentum is no longer enough. Originally published in 1994, What I Lived For is a tome-like close-range study of masculine self-invention and civic corruption. Oates keeps the reader inside Corky’s restless, contradictory consciousness while widening outward into class, local government, race, violence, Catholicism and the mythology of upward mobility. He is repellent, funny, wounded, energetic and often frighteningly recognisable — a man whose private appetites and public ambitions have become almost impossible to distinguish. 

Edition / Condition: Ecco / HarperCollins, New York, 2019. First Ecco paperback edition. Paperback. Very light shelf wear and handling to covers; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Near fine condition.