Alice Munro, a famous author from Canada, has passed away at 92. She was known for her short stories and was highly respected in the literary world.
A representative from the publishing company Penguin Random House Canada said that Munro, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013, passed away at her home in Port Hope, Ontario on Monday. Munro had been sick for a long time and had talked about quitting. She finally decided to retire after her 2012 book, “Dear Life. ”
Munro is a very important short story writer, and is often compared to other famous writers like Chekhov and Cheever. This is unusual because usually short stories are not as respected as novels. She was the first person from Canada to win the Nobel Prize. She was also the first person to win for writing short stories. The Swedish academy said she is really good at writing short stories and can make them feel like a long novel.
Munro wasn’t well-known outside of Canada until she was in her late 30s. But after that, she became one of the few short story writers to keep making money from her work. In North America, more than 1 million copies of “Dear Life” were sold, and after winning the Nobel Prize, the book became one of the best-selling paperbacks in The New York Times list for fiction. Other well-liked books were “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock,” and “The Love of a Good Woman. ”
For more than 50 years, Munro got really good at something amazing: showing the big ideas in life through small, everyday stories. She wrote stories that took place in Canada, but people from all over liked them. She didn’t create one important piece of work, but many well-known and respected works that showed off her wisdom, skill, and talent. She had clever plot twists and shifts in perspective, funny and sometimes sharp humor, and detailed descriptions of people’s lives. She was able to understand people from different ages and backgrounds and had a talent for creating characters, like the adulterous woman described as “short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. ” Someone who doesn’t understand irony.
She was most famous for writing stories like “The Beggar’s Maid,” about a nervous girl who marries a rich boy, “Corrie,” about a rich girl who has a fling with a married architect, and “The Moons of Jupiter,” about a writer who visits her sick father in a hospital in Toronto and remembers their past together.
“I believe that every life can be fascinating,” Munro expressed during an interview after winning the Nobel Prize in 2013. “I believe that anything around us can be fascinating. ”
Not liking Munro, as a writer or person, felt wrong. In her author photos, she had a big and friendly smile and seemed down-to-earth and alert. She was able to come up with stories easily, like how songwriters find melodies. She was greatly respected and praised by famous writers like Jonathan Franzen, John Updike, and Cynthia Ozick. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a book about her life. In the book, she said that she sometimes feels like she’s living in one of her mom’s stories because they feel so real. Canadian author Margaret Atwood said that Sheila Munro was a pioneer for women and for Canadians.
“In the 1950s and 60s, when Munro started writing, people thought that female writers and Canadians were breaking the rules,” Atwood said in a 2013 tribute in the Guardian after Munro won the Nobel Prize. Munro had a difficult time on her way to winning a Nobel Prize. In the past, it would have been impossible for someone from her background to become a famous writer.
Although not directly involved in politics, Munro experienced and took part in the changes in society and culture during the 1960s and ’70s, and allowed her characters to do the same. She was the daughter of a farmer and got married at a young age. She left her husband in the 1970s and started wearing short skirts and dancing around, as she mentioned in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. Many of her stories compared Munro’s parents’ time with their children’s lives, when housewives had more freedom and didn’t just dream at home.
People who love watching movies would get to know the story of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain. ” It’s about a married woman who has memory loss and ends up having an affair with another person at the nursing home. The story gets even more complicated because her husband has cheated on her many times in the past. The movie “Away from Her” was based on the book “The Bear” and directed by Sarah Polley. Julie Christie was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the film. In 2014, Kristen Wiig acted in a movie called “Hateship, Loveship,” which is based on a story about a housekeeper who quits her job and goes to a faraway town to be with a man she thinks loves her. But she doesn’t know that the love letters she got were actually written by his daughter and a friend.
Before winning the Nobel Prize, Munro received awards from different countries where English is spoken. This includes the Man Booker International Prize in Britain and the National Book Critics Circle award in the US. She was also made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In Canada, she won the Governor General’s Award three times and the Giller Prize two times.
Munro chose to be a writer of short stories and it seemed to be on purpose. Judith Jones worked as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, who worked with authors Updike and Anne Tyler, didn’t want to publish “Lives of Girls & Women,” the only novel by the author. Knopf wrote in a private message that the author can write well, but is better at writing short stories.
Munro admitted that she didn’t think like a novelist.
“I have different parts of my life that don’t connect, and I see the same thing in other people’s lives,” she told the AP. “That was one of the reasons why I couldn’t write novels. ” I didn’t see things fitting together very well.
Alice Ann Laidlaw was born in Wingham, Ontario in 1931. She spent a lot of her childhood there, and often wrote about it in her stories. Her father was a fox farmer and her mother was a teacher. Her family didn’t always have a lot of money, so it made her very aware of class differences. Young Alice loved to read from a very young age, especially when she was introduced to “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen. She was always making up stories and was the type of child who would even read while walking upstairs or while doing the dishes.
A smart student in high school got a scholarship to go to the University of Western Ontario. She is studying journalism but really wants to study literature. She sold a story to CBC Radio about a lonely teacher while still in college. She was also writing and sharing her work in her school’s book of stories and poems.
A classmate read “Dimensions” and told the teacher that it reminded him of another author, Chekhov. Gerald Fremlin was going to be her second husband. Another classmate, James Munro, was her first husband. They got married in 1951 when she was 20 years old. They had four children, but one of them died shortly after being born.
Alice Munro lived in Vancouver with her family. She wrote stories between doing her chores, helping her husband at their bookstore, and taking her kids to school. Some of her stories were based on her experiences at the bookstore. She wrote a book in her laundry room at home, with her typewriter next to the washing machine and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and other Southern American writers gave her ideas, with their strong connection to their surroundings and their knowledge of weird and ridiculous things.
She was far from the main literary hub in Toronto, but she still got her writing published in a few magazines and caught the eye of an editor at Ryerson Press (which was later bought by McGraw Hill). Her first book, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” came out in 1968 with a first printing of about 2,700 copies. One year later, it won an important award and made Munro very famous in Canada. “A city mom is surprised by sudden fame,” read a newspaper headline.
“When the book arrived, they sent me six copies. ” I placed them in the closet. I didn’t see them. I didn’t tell my husband that they came, because I couldn’t handle it. “I thought it was really bad,” Munro told the AP. “One night, he was gone, and I made myself sit and read the whole thing. I actually didn’t think it was too bad. ” And I thought I could accept it and everything would be fine.
In the early 1970s, she had left her husband because she didn’t want to be a submissive wife. Her new way of life was shown by how she answered the yearly Canadian census. For a long time, she said she was a “housewife. ” But in 1971, she started calling herself a “writer. ”
Over the next 40 years, more and more people liked and read her stories, and they were often published in The New Yorker. She wrote simply and matter-of-factly, but her stories were full of sadness and chaos: marriages breaking up, people dying violently, and dreams that never came true. She called her childhood community “Canadian Gothic,” and when she and her second husband moved to nearby Clinton in middle age, she went back to that world.
Atwood thinks that Munro’s characters are influenced by feeling ashamed and embarrassed. Munro is also driven by wanting to write perfectly, but she knows it’s impossible to always get it right.
She was very curious and loved to think about the lives of other people. She would be great to talk to on a long train trip. Munro wrote a story called “Friend of My Youth. ” It’s about a man who cheats on his fiancee with her sister and ends up living with both women. She got the idea from a neighbor who mentioned some people who couldn’t play card games because of their religion. The writer wanted to learn more about religion and their neighbors.
Even when Munro was a child, she thought of the world as an exciting and mysterious place. She saw herself as someone who watched everything around her, like a tourist exploring Wingham and looking at all the houses. In “The Peace of Utrecht,” a story written in the late 1960s, a woman finds an old notebook from high school and remembers a dance she went to with a lot of emotion. It made a big impact on her life.
“But now, an experience that didn’t seem important at the time, had become very special to me. It included more than just the girls dancing and the street. It included the whole town, with its simple streets, bare trees, and muddy yards. It also included the dirt roads and the lights of cars coming towards the town, under a big pale sky. “