The Gravedigger's Daughter is a 2007 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is her 36th published novel. The novel was based on the life of Oates's grandmother, whose father, a gravedigger settled in rural America, injured his wife, threatened his daughter, and then committed suicide. Oates explained that she decided to write about her family only after her parents died (in 2000 and 2003), adding that her "family history was filled with pockets of silence. I had to do a lot of imagining."The novel was completed in the early 2000s but its publication was repeatedly bumped in favor of releasing new Oates novels "her American publisher believed were more 'controversial', such as Missing Mom." The novel's epistolary epilogue was first published as a short story titled "The Cousins" in the July 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine, and was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of 2005 and in Oates's 2006 collection High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006. The Gravedigger's Daughter was published on June 1, 2007, and debuted at #17 on the New York Times Best Seller list. The novel was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Source: Wikipedia (en)