final literature project for professor Gary

1. ALICE MUNRO
2013 Nobel Prize winning author in literature

2. Biography

3. Alice Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw on July 10, 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Canada, daughter of Robert Eric
Laidlaw a fox and mink farmer and Ann Clarke Laidlaw a school teacher. Alice began writing as a teenager attended
the university of western Ontario on a two year scholarship and published her first story by 1950 at the age of 19. By
1951 she left her alma matter and married her first husband James Munro. They had four daughters her second
daughter unfortunately died 15 hours after being born. In between taking care of her children and domestic duties she
managed to write many short stories. Her publishers often times questioned if she was ever going to write an actual
novel which left her quite disillusioned because she could never get herself to even start writing one sentence. Finally
in 1968 she published her first book as a collection of 15 of her short stories. By 1973 Alice and Jim Munro ended
their 22 year marriage, that very same year she met her second husband Gerald Fremlin whom she married in 1976,
by this point she had published 2 more short story collections. She continued her success in short story writing and
wrote another 13 short story collections many of them award winners. In 2013 she won the Nobel Prize in
contemporary short story literature a great end to a great writing career for the 82 year old.
(http://www.biography.com/people/alice-munro-9418218)

4. Awards
Governor General's Literary Award for English language fiction (1968, 1978, 1986)
Canadian Booksellers Award for Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
Shortlisted for the annual (UK) Booker Prize for Fiction (now the Man Booker Prize) (1980) for The Beggar
Maid
Marian Engel Award (1986)
Trillium Book Award for Friend of My Youth (1991), The Love of a Good Woman (1999) and Dear Life
(2013)[25]
WH Smith Literary Award (1995, UK) for Open Secrets
Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (1995)
PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction (1997)
National Book Critics Circle Award (1998, U.S.) For The Love of a Good Woman
Giller Prize (1998 and 2004)
Rea Award for the Short Story (2001) given to a living American or Canadian author.
Libris Award
O. Henry Award for continuing achievement in short fiction in the U.S. for "Passion" (2006) and "What Do You
Want To Know For" (2008)
Man Booker International Prize (2009, UK)[26]
Canada-Australia Literary Prize
Commonwealth Writers Prize Regional Award for Canada and the Caribbean.
Nobel Prize in Literature (2013) as "master of the contemporary short story".

5. Chronology of published
works by Alice Munro

6. Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
Something I‟ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)
Who Do You Think You Are? (1979)
The Moons of Jupiter (1982)
The Progress of Love (1986)
Friend of My Youth (1990)
Open Secrets (1994)
Selected Stories (1996)
The Love of a Good Woman (1998)
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)
Runaway (2004)
The View from Castle Rock (2006)
Alice Munro‟s Best (2008)
Too Much Happiness (2009)
Dear Life (2012)
Source:
http://alicemunro.ca/published-works/

7. Style and work habits

8. Alice Munro is a superb short story writer, in a mere snippet of pages she manages to tell a complete story and says
more in less paragraphs and sentences than a novel. Her stories do not have heroes or heroines, they have flawed
human beings with sexual desires, denial, hope for love, and everyday experiences we have learned to take for
granted because they are so usual, common, every day. She does not make us feel but rather allows us to
understand the feelings of the characters that she writes about. Munro‟s writing is very minimalistic yet grand, she
can make the reader feel as if they read a novel in 30 pages or less. She has managed to tap the human psyche of
simple life a bored lonely housewife, a young teacher open to love unrequited, a lost child, divorce, marriage, affairs,
loss, love, lust, and vulnerability. All of Munro‟s characters are hopelessly human. She tells her stories the same way
a person may recall a moment in time. She places her characters and the reader in that moment that could have
made all the difference in the world. It was very noticeable from the very first story that Munro‟s inner and external
geography is centered in the area of the Great Lakes in Ontario Canada, most of her stories take place in and
around that area in a rural setting. Her scenery is superb with a few sentences she paints a train station, a town, a
lake, or any location. It is as if she were able to pick out of the scenes just that thing that will make the reader fill in
the rest of scenery. Eileen Battersby a writer for the Irish Times covering the Nobel prize winner says “the Nobel
committee has acknowledged in this, the award‟s 110th year, that great stories are created by a nuanced sentence, a
sudden realization, a life-changing wrong choice; they are made in the description of a knowing glance, the angle of
a character‟s shoulders as they walk away, in the slow anger that destroys a love and shapes memory. Character,
not plot, drives her art, which explores life as lived.” (http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/short-and-very-sharp-themajesty-of-alice-munro-1.1556635?page=1) It could not have been said much better than this. Munro‟s strength
comes from the most difficult place it could possibly come from, the common, the ordinary the every day we
constantly miss.

9. Critical Assesment

10. I selected two of my favorite readings from dear life to critically assess because of their superb writing. The first story
I selected was „To reach Japan‟ and somehow this story about 30 pages or less posed more troubles in reading than
did a novel with four times as many pages. I read this short story about three times before I understood it fully.
Perhaps it was Munro‟s writing style something I am not used to. In this short story as in most of Munro‟s stories the
characters‟ feelings thoughts and expressions are not explained nor told because in today‟s writing there is no
guessing. Today‟s writing is much simpler, perhaps it could be said that it is even catered to the lazy reader. Munro
hints, she is subtle and even a little bit taboo like her character Greta in „to reach japan‟ she has an “it‟s so bad but it‟s
oh so good” mentality. Her male protagonists have very little depth but they nonetheless form an integral interaction
for her female leads. In „to reach japan‟ Greta‟s boredom being a house wife with a man who is also the safe and
boring unassuming husband has her seemingly trapped. She is fiery and expressive and has burning desires and it is
implied that Greta has a very big problem with the common and the monotonous. She meets a man at a literary party
where she is impressed by him but most of all by the possibility of “what if” when he states that he wanted to kiss her.
He leaves her and she knows not much more than his name but proceeds to find him. The little “what if” is a seed in
her mind that leads her to write a letter and perhaps find the man she met that night. On her way to meet him she has
a little tryst with a gentleman on the train and by the end it is revealed that her letter did reach Japan after all and
found her what if answered. Patricia Duncker from „literary review‟ had this to say: “In 'To Reach Japan', the central
character, Greta, has sex on the train with a much younger man, an actor she has only just met. One of Munro's
subversive strengths lies in her sly refusal to reveal whose story we should be following. Greta's little daughter goes
missing while her mother is with the young man, and the brief hunt for her is genuinely alarming, but once she is
discovered on the shifting metal plates between two carriages - significantly a place of transition - the story passes to
her. As Greta confronts the next possible lover, the child pulls herself free. 'She didn't try to escape. She just stood
waiting for whatever had to come next. (http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/duncker_11_12.php).

11. Munro‟s other story was „Haven‟ a story about a young girl living with relatives while her parents are away doing
missionary type work in Africa. The story is centered on a young girl who is living with her uncle Jasper and aunt
Dawn as she is coming of age. She is growing up in a world where her aunt has allowed her husband to dictate
the way their lives are lived. What I find intriguing is the way in which Munro tells the story of aunt Dawn through
the eyes of a young girl. This story makes you ask questions, is Dawn really happy, and is uncle Jasper satisfied
with such a woman. Her parents live as free individuals not restrained by society or religion as compared to uncle
Jasper‟s household. The main idea here is the transition of the times and Munro makes an excellent melding of
both new and older customs. This home is uncle Jasper‟s haven and he is going to hold on to it “The house was
his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his. Even if he was at his practice next door, or
out on a call, things had to be ready for his approval at any moment.” Most of these stories are set in the rural
towns around Lake Huron in Munro's native Ontario, around the time of the second world war, and the petty
humiliations of small-town life are apparent in each. According to Louise Doughty “In "Haven", a young woman is
forced to stay with an uncle and aunt while her parents are in Africa and becomes witness to the way in which
the uncle continually undermines his wife and how his hatred of a musically talented sister persists unto the
sister's untimely death”. Munro's stories are full of smart young women wryly observing men's desire for
dominance and other women's collusion with their own subservience.”
(http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/25/dear-life-alice-munro-review)
Although the stories Munro writes do not make me a fan of short stories it does influence the way that I
view the characters in my books. It is amazing to me how I can get to know a character better in a few pages
than I sometimes can in a whole novel. None of her main characters are undeveloped and this is because of the
way she can get their feelings across to the reader. Although not my personal style of book. I can really
appreciate Munro‟s art of writing so much in so little she deserves the Nobel she received.

12. Alice Munro’s place in
literary history

13. Indeed I have a very hard time describing Alice Munro‟s place in literary history since I learned about her from a
moldy old book I found in an old box “dance of the happy shades” in September. Yet less than a day ago from the
moment I started to write this frame Alice Munro was awarded the official Nobel prize and they wrote the words that
truly describe her place in history. These are some of the words they had to say today from Stockholm on this
December 10, 2013 and they are more appropriate than anything I could write.
Canadian short story legend Alice Munro was celebrated Tuesday as a “stunningly precise” writer who “is often able
to say more in 30 pages than an ordinary novelist is capable of in 300” at a ceremony where her daughter Jenny
accepted the Nobel Prize for literature on her behalf.
“Munro writes about what are usually called ordinary people, but her intelligence, compassion and astonishing
power of perception enable her to give their lives a remarkable dignity — indeed redemption — since she shows
how much of the extraordinary can fit into that jam-packed emptiness called The Ordinary,” Peter Englund,
permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Tuesday during a formal ceremony at the Stockholm Concert
Hall.
“The trivial and trite are intertwined with the amazing and unfathomable, but never at the cost of contradiction. If you
have never before fantasized about the strangers you see on a bus, you begin doing so after having read Alice
Munro.”
Raised in the southwestern Ontario farming community of Wingham, Munro is only the 13th woman to be awarded
the Nobel Prize in literature, and the first Canadian-based author to receive it. She is the 110th laureate in literature.
(http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/1172996-alice-munro-s-prose-called-stunningly-precise-as-daughter-acceptsnobel)

14. “Over the years, numerous prominent scientists have received a well-deserved award in this auditorium for having
solved some of the great enigmas of the universe or of our material existence. But you, dear Alice Munro, like few
others, have come close to solving the greatest mystery of them all: the human heart and its caprices.”
- Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy

15. Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Munro
http://www.biography.com/people/alice-munro-9418218
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/06/alice-munro-interview-nobel-prize-short-story-literature
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/short-and-very-sharp-the-majesty-of-alice-munro-1.1556635?page=1
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/25/dear-life-alice-munro-review
http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/1172996-alice-munro-s-prose-called-stunningly-precise-as-daughter-accepts-nobel