Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer who was born in 1931. She is well known for her collections of short stories that began when she was just a teenager. Alice’s first story was published in 1950 while she was a student at the University of Western Ontario. Alice left the University in 1951 to get married and become a mother. She gave birth to 4 daughters, one of which died 15 hours after birth.
The first collection of Alice Munro’s stories called “Dance of the Happy Shades” was published in 1968 and received high acclaim including winning Canada’s highest literary prize the Governor General’s Award. The collections have continued over the years and some of her stories have been adapted to film.
Ms. Munro has maintained a general setting for her stories; most of them are placed in Huron County, Ontario. This regional focus and all knowing narrator are features of her fiction works. Many people have compared Munro’s small town settings to the American writers from the rural South such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. But the characters of Alice Munro’s work have less intense reactions, which makes her well known as an author who captures the personality and essence of the “every” man.
Frequent themes in Alice Munro’s work are the dilemmas of coming of age and dealing with family in a small town. This of course relates to her own beginnings as a writer at a young age. Over time, Ms. Munro has moved on to focus on middle age, single women and the elderly. Alice Munro is a writer who writes what she knows, what she has experienced or witnessed and helps the reader make sense of the same issues in their own lives. Critics have claimed that while they are short stories, the works of Alice Munro have the emotional and literary depth of full length novels.
There is a new collection of Alice Munro’s short stories tentatively scheduled to be released in 2009. Over the years her work has been published not only in her collections but in many newspapers, periodicals and magazines.
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