Alice Munro Research Paper

Entry 13 – Author’s Bio Alice Munro, née Alice Ann Laidlaw, was born on July 10, 1931 in Ontario, Canada. Born to a fox farmer father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, and a former schoolteacher mother, Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw. She left her family’s farm to study at the University of Western Ontario, where she majored in journalism and English. However, she left the university without finishing her degree to marry her first husband, James Munro. As newlyweds, the couple moved from Ontario to Vancouver. There, in Victoria, they established a bookstore. While managing the bookstore, Munro began to write and publish these works in some magazines. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968. It became a big hit in
Her career has spanned over 35 years, and yet readers still love her collections. Her ability to be recognized with such an important prize with only short stories shows that short stories are not simply stepping stones to novels; they are literary works all by themselves. Her works remain in circulation today, as her short stories cover topics still relevant, like the relationships between men and women, discontentment with life, and growing up. Her career is still far from over, even if she has truly retired from writing. Her works can be applied to almost everyone’s life and they shed a deeper meaning on what it means to be human. Alice Munro’s career is truly storied, and her stories have garnered newfound respect for the genre of short
She knew how she wanted it to be. She would have liked to wear a simple white blouse, a peasant girl’s smock with the string open at the neck. She did not own a blouse of that description and in fact had only seen them in pictures. And she would have liked to let her hair down. Or if it had to be up, she would have liked it piled very loosely and bound with strings of pearls. Instead she wore her blue silk shirt-waist and bound her hair as usual. She thought the picture made her look rather pale, hollow-eyed. Her expression was sterner and more foreboding than she had intended. She sent it