Biography

Alice Munro was born July 10, 1931 in Wingham, Ontario Canada to Robert Eric Laidlaw and Ann Laidlaw.  She was the eldest of three siblings.  Her father went from being a fox farmer to being a watchman and raising turkeys.  While she was raised to the skills of being a farmer’s wife, the urge to be a writer was always in Alice Munro.  In 1949, she received a scholarship to University of Western Ontario where she majored in journalism.  Munro admits that she never wanted to be a journalist, but could not tell people she wanted to be a writer.  As an undergraduate Munro sold her first story "The Dimensions of a Shadow."  She finished two years of college, but then left to move with her husband, James Munro to Vancouver.

            Alice Munro spent her time focused on raising her three children, Sheila, Jenny, and Andrea, which led to a very slow start to her career.  For years she would only publish a story or two in small Canadian magazines.  With a slow beginning Munro lost a lot of confidence in herself as a writer.  In 1963, Munro and her husband moved to Victoria where they ran a bookstore, which helped open Munro up to a whole new world of people.  She found being a housewife to be a boring and isolated job, so being around people was exactly what she needed.  She divorced James in 1972, and once again married in 1976 this time to Gerald Fremlin.  Alice and Gerald returned to Ontario to settle down.

            Most of Munro’s work centralizes in southwestern Ontario where Munro grew up.  She concentrates on human relationships which she suggests “are more troubling than fulfilling.  It is ‘the fascinating pain; the humiliating necessity’ of human contact that most occupies her attention” (Current Biography).  She draws from her relationships in real life for inspiration on her characters.  In many stories the mother has either Parkinson’s or some similar disease just as her own mother passed away from in 1959.  Fathers are strong characters with a love of language just as her father who wrote a novel in his final years.  This novel A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family  was published two years after his death.  She also finds that what she conceptualizes and what ends up on the page are usually two very different things, and it has taken time for her to accept this.

            Through the years some of her works have been made into made for television movies on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  Some of these works were “Baptising” in 1975 and Boys and Girls and An Ounce of Cure in 1983.  Some of her stories were also produced as sound recordings by the American Audio Prose Library, such as “The Progress of Love” and Friend of My Youth.  Alice has received many awards through the years.  She was presented with Canada's highest literary award, Governor General's Award at three different occasions.  She has also received the Canadian Booksellers Association International Book Year Award for her one novel.

Munro has a unique style of writing.  She does her first draft in notebooks working on two or three pages a day for three or four hours a day, and then she will spend months revising her writing on a type writer.  Munro suggests that she writes the short story because she wants to “write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected moments of experience.  I guess that’s the way I see life.  People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.  The novel has to have a coherence which I don’t see anymore in the lives around me” (Current Biography). 

“Alice Munro.” Contemporary Authors. 21 Feb. 2003: Gale Literary Databases.

EBSCOhost. Monmouth Coll. Lib., Monmouth, Il. 29 Sept. 2005 <http://galenet.galegroup.com>.

This article provided an overview of Alice Munro’s life. It contained not only basic biographical information, but it also looked at each of her works and provided further readings on Munro.

“Alice Munro.” Current Biography. H.W. Wilson, 1990: Current Biography 1940-

Present. EBSCOhost. Monmouth Coll. Lib., Monmouth, Il. 29 Sept. 2005

<http://vweb.hwwilsonweb.com>.

This article discusses Munro life and biography. It deals with how her relationships have affected her writing, and how her writing has grown through the years.

Murphy, Georgeann. Canadian Women Writing Fiction. Pearlman, Mickey, ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi,

1993. 12-27.

This book provided great information about how Munro’s writing correlates with her life. There are different chapters about the important female Canadian writers and Munro is the first one in the book.