Alice Munro, Nobel Prize winner for literature revered as master of the short story, dies at 92

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 the age of 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 final after the author’s 2012 collection, “Dear Life.”

Often ranked alongside Anton Chekhov, John Cheever, and a handful of other short story writers, Munro has achieved a rare stature for an art form traditionally placed beneath the novel. She was the first long-time Canadian to win the Nobel Prize and the first recipient cited exclusively for short fiction. Echoing the judgment of so many before, the Swedish academy called her “a master of the contemporary short story” capable of “containing all the epic complexity of the novel in a few short pages.”

Munro, little known outside of Canada until her late thirties, also became one of the few short story writers to enjoy continued commercial success. Sales in North America alone exceeded one million copies, and the Nobel Prize announcement propelled “Dear Life” to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for paperback novels. Other popular books include “Too Much Happiness,” “The View from Castle Rock,” and “A Good Wife’s Love.”

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 around Canada that attracted audiences distant readers. She produced no definitive work, but dozens of classics that were showcases of wisdom, technique and talent – ​​her inspired twists and turns and artful shifts of time and perspective; his subtle, sometimes cutting humor; its summary of lives in broad dimensions and in the smallest details; his vision of people of all ages or all origins, his genius for drawing a character, like the adulterous woman presented as “small, cushioned, with dark eyes and expansive”. I’m a stranger to irony.

Her best-known fiction included “The Beggar Maid,” a courtship between an insecure young woman and an officious rich boy who becomes her husband; “Corrie,” in which a wealthy 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 from different parts of their lives.

“I think any life can be interesting,” Munro said in a 2013 post-prize interview for the Nobel Foundation. “I think any environment can be interesting.”

To dislike Munro, as a writer or as a person, seemed almost heretical. The wide, welcoming smile captured in her author’s photographs was complemented by a down-to-earth demeanor and eyes of keen alertness, befitting a woman who seemed to pull stories out of thin air the way songwriters discover the melodies. She was admired without apparent envy, placed at the top of the pantheon by Jonathan Franzen, John Updike and Cynthia Ozick. Munro’s daughter, Sheila Munro, wrote a memoir in which she confided that “the truth of his fiction is so unassailable that sometimes I even feel like I’m living in an Alice Munro story.” Canadian author Margaret Atwood called her a pioneer for women and for Canadians.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, when Munro began, there was a sense that not only women writers, but also Canadian women, were seen as both intruders and transgressors,” Atwood wrote in a tribute published in 2013 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 once have been nil.”

Although not overtly political, Munro witnessed and participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and enabled her characters to do the same. She was a farmer’s daughter who married young, then left her husband in the 1970s and took to “wearing miniskirts and prancing around”, as she recalled in an interview in 2003 with the Associated Press. Many of his stories contrasted Munro’s parents’ generation with the more open lives of their children, moving away from the years when housewives dreamed “within the walls the husband paid for”.

Movie buffs will become familiar with “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the improbable and fluid story of a married woman suffering from memory loss who has an affair with another nursing home patient, a story further complicated by her husband’s numerous past infidelities. “The Bear” was adapted by Sarah Polley into the 2006 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 remote rural town to meet a man. she believes he is in love with her – unaware that the romantic letters she received were concocted by his 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 Prize in the United States, where the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected her an honorary member . In Canada, she has won the Governor General’s Award three times and the Giller Prize twice.

Munro was a short story writer by choice and, apparently, by design. Judith Jones, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf who worked with Updike and Anne Tyler, declined to publish “Lives of Girls & Women,” her only novel, writing in an internal memo that “there is no doubt that the lady can write but it is also clear that she is first and foremost a writer of short stories.”

Munro would admit 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. “It was one of the problems that prevented me from writing novels. I’ve never seen things come 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 often used in her fiction, notably in the four autobiographical plays that concluded “Dear Life.” His father was a fox farmer, his mother a teacher, and the family’s fortunes fluctuated between middle class and the working poor, giving the future author a particular sensitivity to money and class. Young Alice was often absorbed in literature, starting when she first read “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen. She was a compulsive storyteller and “the kind of child who reads as she climbs the stairs and puts a book in front of her when she does the dishes.”

An excellent high school student, she received a scholarship to study at the University of Western Ontario, majoring in journalism, to “hide” her quest for literature. She was still a student when she sold a story about a lonely professor, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” to CBC radio. She also published work in her school’s literary magazine.

A classmate read “Dimensions” and wrote to Laidlaw at the time, telling him that the story reminded him of Chekhov. The student, Gerald Fremlin, would become her second husband. Her first husband was another schoolmate, James Munro. They married in 1951, when she was just 20, and had four children, one of whom died shortly after birth.

Based with her family in British Columbia, Alice Munro writes between her trips to school, her household chores and her help at the bookstore which they co-own and which will appear in some of her stories. She wrote a book in the laundry room of her home, her typewriter placed near the washer and dryer. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and other writers from the American South inspired her with their sense of place and understanding of the strange and absurd.

Isolated from the literary center of Toronto, she managed to get published in several literary magazines and attract the attention of an editor at Ryerson Press (later purchased by McGraw Hill). His first collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades,” was released in 1968 with an initial print run of just under 2,700 copies. A year later he won the Governor General’s Award and made Munro a national celebrity – and a curiosity. “Literary Fame Caughts Town Mother Unprepared,” ran the headline in one newspaper.

“When the book first arrived, they sent me half a dozen copies. I put them in the closet. I didn’t watch them. I didn’t tell my husband that they had come, because I couldn’t stand it. I was afraid it would be terrible,” Munro told the AP. “And one night he was away, and I forced myself to sit down and read it all the way through, and I couldn’t believe it. didn’t think it was too serious and I felt like I could recognize it and everything would be okay.

By the early 1970s, she had left her husband, later observing that she was not “prepared to be a submissive wife.” His changing life was best illustrated by his response to the annual Canadian census. For years, she had written about her job as a “housewife.” In 1971, she became a “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 simple, his tone neutral, but his plots revealed endless disruptions and disappointments: broken marriages, violent deaths, follies, and dreams unrealized, or never even attempted. “Canadian Gothic” was one of the ways she described the community of her childhood, a world she returned to 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 was a driving force for her: understanding, doing things well, but also the impossibility of that.”

She had the kind of curiosity that would have made 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 tells him about some neighbors who belonged to a religion prohibiting card games. The author wanted to know more – about religion, about neighbors.

Even as a child, Munro viewed the world as an adventure and a mystery and herself as an observer, walking around Wingham and visiting 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 envelop her entire life.

“And now an experience that seemed not at all memorable at the time,” Munro writes, “had transformed into something curiously meaningful to me and complete; it encompassed more than the dancing girls and the single street, it extended over the whole city, with its rudimentary layout of streets and its bare trees and its muddy courtyards barely cleared of snow, on the dirt roads where the headlights appeared cars, bumpy. towards the city, under an immense pale sky.