Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author who perfected the art of the contemporary short story, died on Monday, May 13, Penguin Random House Canada has confirmed. She was 92 years old.
In 14 short story collections, including The maid begs; Hate, Friendship, Dating, Love, Marriage; It is Dear Life, the author captured the familiar dilemmas and complications of everyday life. The children leave home and return to find that everything has changed. Family units fall apart when they are hit by tremendous and unexpected losses. Lovers become partners, then parents, then people they don’t quite recognize. Munro portrayed these narratives with masterful levels of intelligence, humor, and care, and in doing so challenged the principles of fiction writing to show the power of the short story.
“Thanks, Alice Munro, for a shining gem of a story after another. Thank you for the many days and nights I spent lost in her work,” wrote Jane Smiley in tribute to the author in O Guardian in 2013. “Thank you for your shameless feminine perspective on the lives of girls and women, but also the lives of boys and men. Thank you for your cruelty and also for your kindness, because one plus the other is the essence of truthfulness.”
Munro’s first book of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shadows, was published in 1968 and received Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Literary Merit that year. In the decades that followed, Munro won two additional Governor General’s Awards for Literary Merit. Her work has been celebrated through numerous awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award in 1997 and the 2005 Medal of Honor for Literature from the US National Arts Club. In 2009, she received the Man Booker International Lifetime Achievement Prize. Four years later, Munro became the second Canadian author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
“There’s a kind of tension that, if I’m telling a story correctly, I can feel immediately, and I don’t feel that when I try to write a novel.” Munro told New York Times in 1986. “I kind of want a moment that’s explosive and I want everything to come together in it.”
Life in Canada
Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw on July 10, 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, the daughter of Anne Clarke (née Chamney), a teacher and Robert Eric Laidlaw, a farmer. Munro’s father built the family home, a tree-lined red-brick farm on a country road, where he raised foxes and mink.
Much of Munro’s work is anchored in the cities of western Ontario, giving readers glimpses into the author’s upbringing and family life. In the introduction to his 1996 collection, Selected StoriesMunro described why she loved setting her narratives in the areas of her youth: “I am intoxicated by this landscape, by the almost flat fields, by the swamps, by the deciduous forest, by the continental climate with its extravagant winters.”
Munro fell in love with reading when he was young, and began writing poetry after discovering the work of Alfred Tennyson. One of his favorite books was Wuthering Heights. At age 14, Munro aspired to become a writer. “But back then you didn’t go around announcing something like that,” she told the new York Times in 2013.
When she wasn’t reading, Munro’s teenage years were spent taking care of household chores while his father struggled with his business and his mother struggled with the symptoms of early-onset Parkinson’s disease. She explores this moment at the end of her latest collection, Dear Life, through four narratives she writes are “autobiographical in feeling, though sometimes not entirely autobiographical.” In the revealing pieces, she reflects on growing up while her parents suffered financially and physically. “The strange thing is that I don’t remember those times as unhappy,” Munro wrote in the titular story in Dear life. “There wasn’t a particularly depressing atmosphere in the house. Perhaps it was not understood then that my mother would not get better, only worse.”
As a high school student, Munro’s passion for literature catapulted her to academic success. In 1949, she became valedictorian of her high school class and received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario as a result of her achievements in English. But when her scholarship money ran out in 1951, Munro could no longer afford to enroll. Instead of returning home, she married her first husband, James Munro, a history student from an upper-class family, whom she met at college.
James Munro supported his wife’s ambitions as a writer. In 2006, Munro spoke to the Virginia Quarterly Review about starting out at a time when she didn’t know many women who wanted to write professionally and noted that she was lucky to be married to a man who supported her career. “I was very lucky that way,” she said. “Because I don’t know anyone else who would want their wife to do something that took them away from their ‘normal’ role – or that could be seen as competition.”
Finding the short story form
Alice and James Munro moved to Vancouver in 1951. Between 1953 and 1966, the couple had four daughters: Sheila, Catherine, Jenny and Andrea., although Catherine died shortly after being born. While her husband went to work, Munro found time to write while caring for her children, which meant writing in short bursts during nap time and at odd times of the day.
That, she explained to Atlantic in 2001, contributed to her use of the short story form – she simply did not have the time to devote to writing a novel. “I couldn’t look ahead and say: This is going to take a year, because I thought that every moment something could happen that would take up all my time.”
Although she probably didn’t know it at the time, those years Munro spent as a housewife and young mother would become guiding forces in her fiction. She told stories rooted in domestic dramas, from daughters who didn’t understand their mothers to partners separated due to different upbringings. Munro also experienced romantic conflicts – she and James Munro divorced in 1972. Four years later, she married geographer Gerald Fremlin., and it was then that his career finally began to take off.
Munro was 37 when her first collection of short stories was published in 1968. Dance of the Happy Shadows won Canada’s most prestigious literary award, the Governor’s General Award, and was a decisive first step in building her reputation as a talented writer. She then published Lives of girls and women in 1971 and Something I intend to tell you in 1974.
In the late 1970s, Munro gained even greater acclaim through the publication of his stories in New Yorker. In 1977, she published “Royal Beatings,” which centered on the complicated relationship between a young woman and her stepmother. A year later, the same story appeared in Munro’s collection Who do you think you are? (published outside Canada as The beggar maid), which followed the two women over several decades in 10 interconnected stories. The book received the 1978 Governor General’s Award and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980.
As more of Munro’s stories were published in New Yorker, her prominence as a writer grew. She crafted narratives about realistic female characters and their relationships with growth, aging, and the losses that accompany entering different phases of life. These themes are often the backbone of long novels, but Munro was able to portray her characters’ struggles with painful specificity in just a single story.
In the 1980s, Munro began to debut stories and books more frequently. Stories of her appeared in the pages of Paris ReviewO Atlantic Monthly, and more. Over the years, Munro continued to write critically acclaimed books of short stories. Each built on the momentum of the last, culminating in Munro’s final five collections of the 2000s, which comprise what could be considered his best work.
In the novelist New York by Jonathan Franzen Times analysis from the 2004 Munro collection, To escape, he wrote that Munro kept writing the same story, with the same fundamental elements of love, loss and displacement, but was able to reveal more about the human condition with each. “Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection where I think about my own life: about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death.”
Your lasting legacy
In 2013, Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Typically, the prize is given to novelists, but Munro’s win elevated the power of the short story even further. The award capped off her enormous contribution to the way authors think about story architecture, and she quickly recognized the importance of the win for the genre she nearly perfected. She told Nobel Media after accepting her prize that she hoped it would help elevate the status of the short story for all authors – advancing the form beyond what many writers work on before launching their careers as novelists.
His devotion to the structure of the short story has influenced some of the most celebrated contemporary fiction writers. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri told New Yorker that Munro’s work was revolutionary for her: “She taught me that a short story can do anything. She turned the form upside down. She inspired me to dig deeper, to tear down walls.”
Kristin Cochrane, CEO of Penguin Random House Canada, which has long published Munro’s work under the McClelland & Stewart imprint, responded to the news of her death in a statement: “Alice Munro is a national treasure – a writer of enormous depth, empathy and humanity whose work is read, admired and appreciated by readers across Canada and around the world,” she said. “Alice’s writing has also inspired countless writers, and her work leaves an indelible mark on our literary landscape.”
After winning the Nobel Prize, Munro continued to live a quiet life in Canada. She had announced her retirement from writing a few months before winning the Nobel Prize – and remained true to her word. Dear Life, published in 2012, it was his last collection. When discussing your retirement with your National Publish in June 2013, editor Mark Medley commented that his fans would be disappointed. Munro responded in his typical direct style: “Well, tell them to read the old ones again. There are many of them.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
