Alice Munro is one of the most acclaimed writers in Canada. She was born in Wingham, Ontario on July 10, 1931. She began to take her writing seriously while majoring in English at the University of Western Ontario. In 1951 she dropped out of college to marry James Munro and move to Vancouver where they started to raise a family. In 1963 they moved to Victoria to open Munro's Books which is still a very important bookstore on Vancouver Island. Alice divorced James in 1972 and moved back to Ontario where she married her second husband, Gerald Fremlin in 1976.
Over the past 28 years, she has written only one novel but seven collections of short stories. "I don't really understand a novel, I don't understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a story."ÃÂ (Rothstein 1) She once said to a NY Times reporter.
Munro
University of Western Ontario
English: Wingham, Ontario town hallMs. Munro's stories are reflections of herself. "I've always written about things at my own stage of life"æI am getting to the stage of life where some people who are important to me are dead. I find that I am writing more about people who are under the threat of death."à(Bruckner 2) she said at 58, the same age her mother was when she died.
Her stories are almost always set in rural Huron County Ontario, where she grew up. The main characters in her stories are usually women who are at the same stage in life as her. She writes about small towns because she knows them best. "In small towns, you have no privacy at all. You have a role, a character"æone that other people have made up for you."à(Bruckner 1) With that as a backdrop, her stories deal with how little people truly...