Alice Munro


Alice Munro


Alice Ann Munro (; née Laidlaw ; 10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024) was a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work is said to have revolutionized the architecture of the short story, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time, and with integrated short fiction cycles.

Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Her writing established her reputation as a great author in the vein of Anton Chekhov.

Munro received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her lifetime body of work. She was also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction, and received the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway. She mostly stopped writing around 2013 and died at her home in 2024.

Early life and education

Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and later turned to turkey farming. Her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. She was of Irish and Scottish descent; her father was a descendant of Scottish poet James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.

Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, "The Dimensions of a Shadow", in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario on a two-year scholarship. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James's job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, which still operates.

She had three children with James Munro (one died shortly after birth), and when the children were still young she would attempt to write whenever she could; her husband encouraging her by sending her into the book shop while he looked after the children and cooked. In 1961, after she had had a few stories published in small magazines, the Vancouver Sun ran a brief article on her, titled "Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories", and called her the "least praised good writer". She found it difficult, even with her husband's help, to find the time among "the pile up of unavoidable household jobs" to write, and found it easier to concentrate on short stories, rather than the novels her publisher wanted her to write.

Career

Munro's highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's Award, then Canada's highest literary prize. That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories. In 1978, Munro's collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published. This book earned Munro a second Governor General's Literary Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980 under its international title, The Beggar Maid.

From 1979 to 1982, Munro toured Australia, China and Scandinavia for public appearances and readings. In 1980, she held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland.

From the 1980s to 2012, Munro published a short story collection at least once every four years. First versions of Munro's stories appeared in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, Harper's Magazine, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, and The Paris Review. Her collections have been translated into 13 languages. In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as a "master of the contemporary short story". She was the first Canadian and the 13th woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Munro had a longtime association with editor and publisher Douglas Gibson. When Gibson left Macmillan of Canada in 1986 to launch the Douglas Gibson Books imprint at McClelland and Stewart, Munro returned the advance Macmillan had paid her for The Progress of Love so that she could follow Gibson to the new company. When Gibson published his memoirs in 2011, Munro wrote the introduction, and Gibson often made public appearances on Munro's behalf when her health prevented her from appearing personally.

Almost twenty of Munro's works have been made available for free on the web, in most cases only the first versions. From the period before 2003, 16 stories have been included in Munro's own compilations more than twice, with two of her works scoring four republications: "Carried Away" and "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage".

Film adaptations of Munro's short stories include Martha, Ruth and Edie (1988), Edge of Madness (2002), Away from Her (2006), Hateship, Loveship (2013) and Julieta (2016).

Writing

Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Strong regional focus is one of her fiction's features. Asked after she won the Nobel Prize, "What can be so interesting in describing small town Canadian life?", she replied: "You just have to be there." Another feature is an omniscient narrator. Many compare her small-town settings to writers from the rural American South. Her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. Much of her work exemplifies the Southern Ontario Gothic literary subgenre.

A frequent theme of her work, especially her early stories, is the girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and small hometown. In work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, women alone, and the elderly. Munro's stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Her prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time", "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry", "special, useless knowledge", "tones of shrill and happy outrage", "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it". Her style juxtaposes the fantastic and the ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply and effortlessly evoke life. Robert Thacker wrote:

Munro's writing creates ... an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude—not of mimesis, so-called and ... "realism"—but rather the feeling of being itself ... of just being a human being.

Many critics have written that Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novels. Some have asked whether Munro actually writes short stories or novels. Alex Keegan, writing in Eclectica, answered: "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels."

The first PhD thesis on Munro's work was published in 1972. The first book-length volume collecting the papers presented at the University of Waterloo's first conference on her work, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, was published in 1984. In 2003/2004, the journal Open Letter. Canadian quarterly review of writing and sources published 14 contributions on Munro's work. In 2010, the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)/Les cahiers de la nouvelle dedicated a special issue to Munro, and in 2012, an issue of the journal Narrative focused on a single story by Munro, "Passion" (2004), with an introduction, summary of the story, and five analytical essays.

Creating new versions

Munro published variant versions of her stories, sometimes within a short span of time. Her stories "Save the Reaper" and "Passion" came out in two different versions in the same year, in 1998 and 2004 respectively. Two other stories were republished in a variant versions about 30 years apart, "Home" (1974/2006/2014) and "Wood" (1980/2009).

In 2006, Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano reported that Munro had not wanted to reread the galleys of Runaway (2004): "No, because I'll rewrite the stories." In their symposium contribution An Appreciation of Alice Munro, they say that Munro wrote eight versions of her story "Powers", for example.

Awano writes that "Wood" is a good example of how Munro, "a tireless self-editor", rewrites and revises a story, in this case returning to it for a second publication nearly 30 years later, revising characterizations, themes, and perspectives, as well as rhythmic syllables, a conjunction or a punctuation mark. The characters change, too. Inferring from the perspective they take on things, they are middle-aged in 1980, and older in 2009. Awano perceives a heightened lyricism brought about not least by the poetic precision of Munro's revision. The 2009 version has eight sections to the 1980 version's three, and a new ending. Awano writes that Munro literally "refinishes" the first take on the story with an ambiguity characteristic of her endings, and reimagines her stories throughout her work in various ways.

Personal life

Munro married James Munro in 1951. Their daughters Sheila, Catherine, and Jenny were born in 1953, 1955, and 1957, respectively; Catherine died the day of her birth due to a kidney dysfunction.

In 1963, the Munros moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro's Books, a popular bookstore still in business. In 1966, their daughter Andrea was born. Alice and James Munro divorced in 1972.

Munro returned to Ontario to become writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario, and in 1976 received an honorary LLD from the institution. In 1976, she married Gerald Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer she met during her university days. The couple moved to a farm outside Clinton, Ontario, and later to a house in Clinton, where Fremlin died on 17 April 2013, aged 88. Munro and Fremlin also owned a home in Comox, British Columbia. In 2009, Munro revealed that she had received treatment for cancer and for a heart condition requiring coronary artery bypass surgery.

In 2002, Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro.

Death

Munro died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, on 13 May 2024, at age 92. She had dementia for at least 12 years.

Legacy

Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of the short story, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time, and with integrated short fiction cycles, in which she displayed "inarguable virtuosity". Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade". Munro was seen as a pioneer in short story telling, with the Swedish Academy calling her a "master of the contemporary short story" who could "accommodate the entire epic complexity of the novel in just a few short pages". In her New York Times obituary, Munro's works were credited for "attracting a new generation of readers" and she was called a "master of the short story". Her work is often compared with that of the most critically acclaimed short story writers. In it, as in Anton Chekhov's, plot is secondary and little happens.

Her works and career have been ranked alongside other well-established short story writers such as Chekhov and John Cheever. As in Chekhov, Garan Holcombe writes: "All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail." Her work deals with "love and work, and the failings of both. She shares Chekhov's obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward."

Munro's work has been considered a "national treasure" of Canada as it focuses largely on life in rural Canada from the perspective of womanhood. Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood has called Munro a "pioneer for women, and for Canadians". The Associated Press said that Munro "perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set around Canada that appealed to readers far away."

Sherry Linkon, professor at Georgetown University, said that Munro's works "helped remodel and revitalize the short-story form". The complexity of the themes explored in her work, such as womanhood, death, relationships, aging, and themes associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, were seen as groundbreaking, especially since they were able to be captured in short story form.

Upon winning the Booker Prize, her works were described by judges of the committee as bringing "as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels".

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Works

Original short story collections

  • Dance of the Happy Shades – 1968 (winner of the 1968 Governor General's Award for Fiction)
  • Lives of Girls and Women – 1971 (winner of the Canadian Bookseller's Award)
  • Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You – 1974
  • Who Do You Think You Are? – 1978 (winner of the 1978 Governor General's Award for Fiction; also published as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose; short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980)
  • The Moons of Jupiter – 1982 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
  • The Progress of Love – 1986 (winner of the 1986 Governor General's Award for Fiction)
  • Friend of My Youth – 1990 (winner of the Trillium Book Award)
  • Open Secrets – 1994 (nominated for a Governor General's Award)
  • The Love of a Good Woman – 1998 (winner of the 1998 Giller Prize and the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award)
  • Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage – 2001 (republished as Away from Her)
  • Runaway – 2004 (winner of the Giller Prize and Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize)
  • The View from Castle Rock – 2006
  • Too Much Happiness – 2009
  • Dear Life – 2012

Short story compilations

  • Selected Stories (later retitled Selected Stories 1968–1994 and A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968–1994) – 1996
  • No Love Lost – 2003
  • Vintage Munro – 2004
  • Alice Munro's Best: A Selection of Stories – Toronto 2006 / Carried Away: A Selection of Stories – New York 2006; both 17 stories (spanning 1977–2004) with an introduction by Margaret Atwood
  • My Best Stories – 2009
  • New Selected Stories – 2011
  • Lying Under the Apple Tree. New Selected Stories – 2014
  • Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995–2014 – 2014

Selected awards and honours

Awards

  • Governor General's Literary Award for English language fiction (1968, 1978, 1986)
  • Canadian Booksellers Award for Lives of Girls and women (1971)
  • Canada-Australia Literary Prize, inaugural prize (1977)
  • Shortlisted for the annual (UK) Booker Prize for Fiction (1980) for The Beggar Maid
  • The Writers' Trust of Canada's Marian Engel Award (1986) for her body of work
  • Trillium Book Award for Friend of My Youth (1991), The Love of a Good Woman (1999) and Dear Life (2013)
  • WH Smith Literary Award (1995, UK) for Open Secrets
  • Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1995)
  • PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction (1997)
  • National Book Critics Circle Award (1998, U.S.) For The Love of a Good Woman
  • Giller Prize (1998 and 2004)
  • Rea Award for the Short Story (2001) given to a living American or Canadian author
  • Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (2004) for Runaway
  • Libris Award, 1999 Author of the Year and Fiction Book of the Year (The Love of a Good Woman)
  • Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony (2006).
  • O. Henry Award for continuing achievement in short fiction in the U.S. for "Passion" (2006), "What Do You Want To Know For" (2008) and "Corrie" (2012)
  • Man Booker International Prize (2009, UK)
  • Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book Award for Canada and the Caribbean Region shortlisted (1991, 2002, 2005, 2007)
  • Nobel Prize in Literature (2013) as a "master of the contemporary short story".

Honours

  • 1993: Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal
  • 1997: Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • 2005: Medal of Honor for Literature from the U.S. National Arts Club
  • 2010: Government of France – Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters
  • 2014: Silver coin released by the Royal Canadian Mint in honour of Munro's Nobel Prize win
  • 2015: Postage stamp released by Canada Post in honour of Munro's Nobel Prize win

References

Further reading

External links

  • List of Works
  • Alice Munro at IMDb
  • Alice Munro collected news and commentary at The Guardian
  • "Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137", The Paris Review No. 131, Summer 1994
  • W. H. New. "Literature in English".
  • Alice Munro at the British Council Writers Directory
  • Stories by Alice Munro accessible online
  • Alice Munro's papers (fonds) held at the University of Calgary
  • How To Tell If You Are in an Alice Munro Story, 8 December 2014
  • Alice Munro on Nobelprize.org with a pre-recorded video conversation with the Laureate Alice Munro: In Her Own Words

Text submitted to CC-BY-SA license. Source: Alice Munro by Wikipedia (Historical)



 

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