Nobel laureate Alice Munro, the Canadian literary giant who became one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary authors and one of the most honored short story writers in history, has died at age 92.
A spokesperson for publisher Penguin Random House Canada said Munro, winner of the 2013 literary Nobel Prize, died Monday at his home in Port Hope, Ontario. Munro had been in poor health for years and often talked about retirement, a decision that proved definitive after the author’s 2012 collection, “Dear Life.”
Often classed with Anton Chekhov, John Cheever, and a handful of other short story writers, Munro has achieved a rare stature for an art form traditionally placed below the novel. She was the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize and the first winner cited exclusively for fictional stories. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy declared her a “master of the contemporary short story” who could “pack all the epic complexity of the novel into just a few short pages.”
Munro, little known outside Canada until she was almost 30, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy continued commercial success. Sales in North America alone surpassed 1 million copies, and the Nobel announcement elevated “Dear Life” to the top of The New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list. Other popular books include “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock” and “The Love of a Good Woman.”
Over half a century of writing, Munro perfected one of the greatest tricks of any art form: illuminating the universal through the particular, creating stories set in Canada that appealed to far-flung readers. She produced not a single definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent – their inspired plot twists and ingenious shifts of time and perspective; his subtle, sometimes cutting humor; his summary of lives in broad scope and fine detail; his insights into people of all ages or backgrounds, his genius for sketching a character, like the adulterous woman presented as “short, cute, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony.
Her best-known fiction includes “The Beggar’s Maid,” a courtship between an insecure young woman and a meddling rich boy who becomes her husband; “Corrie”, in which a rich young woman has an affair with an architect “with a wife and young family”; and “The Moons of Jupiter,” about a middle-aged writer who visits her ailing father in a Toronto hospital and shares memories of different parts of their lives.
“I think any life can be interesting,” Munro said during a 2013 post-prize interview with the Nobel Foundation. “I think any environment can be interesting.”
Not liking Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The broad, welcoming smile captured in her photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth manner and keenly alert eyes, befitting a woman who seemed to pluck stories from thin air the way composers discovered melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick at the top of the pantheon. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that “her fictional truth is so incontrovertible that I sometimes feel as if she were living inside an Alice Munro story.” Fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a trailblazer for women and for Canadians.
“In the 1950s and 60s, when Munro started, there was a feeling that not only women writers, but also Canadians, were considered invaders and transgressors,” Atwood wrote in a 2013 tribute published in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel Prize. . “The path to the Nobel was not easy for Munro: the chances of a literary star emerging from his time and place would have been zero.”
Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and allowed her characters to do the same. She was the daughter of a farmer who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and began “wearing miniskirts and walking around,” as she recalled during a 2003 interview with the Associated Press. Many of her stories contrasted Munro’s parents’ generation with the more open lives of their children, departing from the years when housewives daydreamed “between the walls her husband paid for.”
Viewers would become familiar with “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the unlikely and perfect story of a married woman with memory loss who has an affair with a fellow nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her many past infidelities. of her husband. “The Bear” was adapted by director Sarah Polley into the feature film “Away from Her”, which earned Julie Christie an Oscar nomination. In 2014, Kristen Wiig starred in “Hateship, Loveship,” an adaptation of the story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” in which a housekeeper quits her job and travels to a distant rural town to meet a man. she believes she is in love with her – unaware that the romantic letters she received were invented by her daughter and a friend.
Even before the Nobel, Munro received honors from across the English-speaking world, including Britain’s Man Booker International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US, where the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected her an honorary member. In Canada, she was a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award and a two-time winner of the Giller Award.
Munro was a short story writer by choice and, apparently, by intention. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, didn’t want to publish “Lives of Girls & Women”, her only novel, writing in an internal memo that “there is no doubt that you can write, but it is also clear that you are primarily a short story writer”.
Munro would recognize that she did not think like a novelist.
“I have all these disconnected realities in my own life and I see them in other people’s lives,” she told the AP. “That was one of the problems, because I couldn’t write novels. I never saw things coming together very well.
Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931, and spent much of her childhood there, a time and place she frequently used in her fiction, including the four autobiographical plays that concluded “Dear Life.” Her father was a fox farmer, her mother was a teacher, and the family’s fortunes ranged from middle class to working poor, giving the future author a special sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed by literature, starting with the first time she read “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen. She was a compulsive storyteller and the “kind of kid who reads up the stairs and puts a book in front of her while she washes the dishes.”
One of the best students in high school, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism as a “cover” for her pursuit of literature. She was still a graduate student when she sold a story about a lonely professor, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC Radio. She was also publishing work in her school’s literary journal.
A colleague read “Dimensions” and wrote to the then Laidlaw, telling him that the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Another fellow student, James Munro, was her first husband. They married in 1951, when she was just 20, and had four children, one of whom died shortly after birth.
Settling with her family in Vancouver, Alice Munro wrote between going to school, doing household chores and helping her husband in the bookstore they co-owned and which would appear in some of her stories. She wrote a book in the laundry room of her home, with her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and other writers from the American South inspired her, through their sense of place and their understanding of the strange and absurd.
Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she managed to publish in several literary magazines and attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later purchased by McGraw Hill). Her debut collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades”, was released in 1968 with a first print run of just under 2,700 copies. A year later, she won the Governor General’s Award and made Munro a national celebrity—and a curiosity. “Literary fame catches town mother unprepared,” read one newspaper headline.
“When the book came out, they sent me half a dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t tell my husband they had come because he couldn’t handle it. I was afraid it would be terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night, he was out, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all, and I didn’t think it was that bad. And I felt like I could acknowledge that and everything would be okay.”
In the early 1970s, she left her husband, later noting that she was “not ready to be a submissive wife.” Her life change was best illustrated by her response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she recorded her occupation as “housewife.” In 1971, she switched to “writer.”
Over the next 40 years, his reputation and readership only grew, with many of his stories first appearing in The New Yorker. His prose style was direct, his tone was practical, but his plots revealed endless ruptures and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, madness and dreams unfulfilled, or never attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one way she described the community of her childhood, a world to which she returned when, in middle age, she and her second husband moved to nearby Clinton.
“Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters,” Atwood wrote, “just as perfectionism in writing has been a driving force for her: understanding, getting it right, but also the impossibility of it.”
She had the kind of curiosity that would make her an ideal companion on a long train journey, imagining the lives of other passengers. Munro wrote the story “Friend of My Youth”, in which a man has an affair with his fiancée’s sister and ends up living with both women, after an acquaintance told him about some neighbors who belonged to a religion that prohibited card games. . The author wanted to know more—about the religion, about the neighbors.
Even as a child, Munro considered the world an adventure and a mystery and herself an observer, walking around Wingham and looking at the houses as if she were a tourist. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” an autobiographical story written in the late 1960s, a woman discovers an old high school notebook and remembers a ball she once attended with an intensity that would encompass her entire existence.
“And now an experience that seemed nothing memorable at the time,” Munro wrote, “has been transformed into something curiously meaningful and complete for me; It encompassed more than the dancing girls and the single street, it spread throughout the city, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards, barely free of snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, bobbing towards the city, under an immense pale sky.
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