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The 1960s were one of the most tumultuous and divisive decades in world history, marked by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and antiwar protests, political assassinations and the emerging "generation gap."

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Alice Munro's short story, "Boys and Girls," has a very interesting detail written into it. The narrator's brother is named Laird, which was carefully chosen by the author. Laird is a synonym for lord, which plays a important role in a story where a young girl has society's unwritten rules forced upon her. At the time of the story, society did not consider men and women equal. The name symbolized how the male child was superior in the parent's eyes and in general. Along with that, the name also symbolizes the difference between the sexes when this story took place. The time when this story took place was a time when men and women were not equal. Mothers had traditional roles, which usually left them in the house, while men also had their roles, outside of the house.

The male was the dominant figure in the house, while the woman had to be subservient. It was an off thing to see my mother down at the barn. She did not often come out of the house unless it was to do something - hang out the wash or dig potatoes in the garden. She looked out of place, with her bare lumpy legs, not touched by the sun, her apron still on and damp across the stomach from the supper dishes. The narrator had problems coming to terms with the role in life that she was expected to lead. She wanted to work outside with her father doing the work that she deemed important. The mother tried to get the narrator to work inside doing work deemed appropriate for a lady, however it was not something she enjoyed. "I hated the hot dark kitchen in the summer" (p. 530). The narrator was not considered of any consequential help to her father, simply because she was female. "Could of fooled me," said the salesman. "I thought it was only a girl" (p. 529). Even though the narrator could do more work than her younger brother, she was still under appreciated. "Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you'll have a real help" (p. 530).

Laird, on the other hand, was able to go out and do the things that he enjoyed. When Flora, the family's horse, runs away Laird is invited to join the father and his assistant to re-capture the horse, while the narrator must stay at home. When the narrator is reminiscing of the past, she recalls a time when she lured Laird up to the top of the barn. The whole purpose of this idea was to get Laird in trouble. However, when her parents come and remove Laird from danger, they are actually mad at her, instead of Laird. This shows how the parents were more concerned with their son and that he could do no wrong. This reflects society's notion at the time, how men were always right. My father came, my mother came, my father went up the ladder talking very quietly and brought Laird down under his arm, at which my mother leaned against the ladder and began to cry. They said to me, "Why weren't you watching him?" (p. 534) The grandmother is the best example of how women were thought of at the time. She is from a time when there were even stricter rules of conduct for girls. The narrator's parents are more lackadaisical than the grandmother and a lot less out-spoken. She voices what was taught to her when she was a child. At the time of the story, girls were expected to be dainty and quaint, while a man was expected to be the rough and tumble one. "Girls don't slam doors like that." "Girls keep their knees together when they sit down." And worse still, when I asked some questions, "That's none of girls' business." I continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free. (p. 532) The narrator, however, did not keep herself free. Eventually, she began to change and to become a stereotypical female. She began to conform to society's idea's about women.

Near the end of the story, Laird starts to realize his sex-determined superiority. He explains to his father and mother how Flora escaped from the yard and also starts listening to his father almost exclusively. "We shot old Flora," he said, "and cut her up in fifty pieces." "Well I don't want to hear about it," my mother said. "And don't come to my table like that." My father made him go and wash the blood off. (p. 536) Laird washes the blood off only after his father tells him to do so. This shows the dominance of males in the society of the time. Laird may field his mother's complains, but only does something about it once his father tells him to do so. This shows how his father is the authority figure, that his mother secondary to his father. Even the daughter thinks lowly of the mother in comparison to the father. "It showed how little my mother knew about the way things really were" (p. 531). "Boys and Girls" takes place at a time where there is no such thing as equality between the sexes. Men in this society are the dominant, authoritarian heads of the house-hold whose work is done outside the home. Women are expected to look after the men and their work is done in the home. The narrator in "Boys and Girls" slowly becomes accustom with her role in society. The narrator and her brother symbolize the roles of males and females in that society. The narrator is forced into doing jobs that she doesn't enjoy doing, namely that associated with women's work at the time. Laird is allowed to do what he pleases. Laird is the lord, as a male he is deemed as the more important of the two, simply because of his sex, while the narrator cast into her womanly role, being of secondary importance.
Bibliography
1 Munro, Alice, "Boys and Girls," Introduction to literature, eds. Gillian Thomas et al, third ed. (Toronto: Hardcourt Brace, 1995), p. 528 All subsequent references will be from this edition and will be cited in the text.

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Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls": Summary & Analysis

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Alice Munro's short story, "Boys and Girls," has a very interesting detail written into it. The narrator's brother is named Laird, which was carefully chosen by the author. Laird is a synonym for lord, which plays a important role in a story where a young girl has society's unwritten rules forced upon her.

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During Alice Munro's Prime, the Civil Rights Movement started.

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During Alice Munro's Prime, the Civil Rights Movement started.

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American civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s broke the pattern of public facilities' being segregated by "race" in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865-77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")

Abolitionism to Jim Crow

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country's inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the "People of the United States" who established the Constitution in order to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights-such as the right to own land or serve on juries-were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called "free Blacks" endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means-protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements-to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography-one of many slave narratives-and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country's founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." This ruling-by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories-ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country's political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln's victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860-61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property. After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the " Jim Crow" system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that " separate but equal" facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage).

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American civil rights movement | Definition, Protests, Activists, & Facts

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American civil rights movement, mass protest against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern U.S. that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. Its roots were in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to abolish slavery and resist racial oppression.

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Some 350,000 women served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II, both at home and abroad. They included the Women's Airforce Service Pilots, who on March 10, 2010, were awarded the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal. Meanwhile, widespread male enlistment left gaping holes in the industrial labor force and defense industry. Women were critical to the war effort: Between 1940 and 1945, the age of "Rosie the Riveter," the female percentage of the U.S. workforce increased from 27 percent to nearly 37 percent, and by 1945, nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home. World War II opened the door for women to work in more types of jobs than ever before, but with the return of male soldiers at war's end, women, especially married women, were once again pressured to return to a life at home, a prospect that, for thousands of American women, had shifted thanks to their wartime service.

Women in the Armed Forces in World War II

In addition to factory work and other home front jobs, approximately 350,000 women joined the Armed Services, serving at home and abroad. At the urging of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and women's groups, and impressed by the British use of women in service, General George Marshall supported the idea of introducing a women's service branch into the Army. In May 1942, Congress instituted the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, later upgraded to the Women's Army Corps, which had full military status. Its members, known as WACs, worked in more than 200 non-combatant jobs stateside and in every theater of the war. By 1945, there were more than 100,000 WACs and 6,000 female officers. In the Navy, members of Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) held the same status as naval reservists and provided support stateside. The Coast Guard and Marine Corps soon followed suit, though in smaller numbers.

Did you know? On March 10, 2010, nearly 70 years after they were disbanded, the Women Airforce Service Pilots received the Congressional Gold Medal.

One of the lesser-known roles women played in the war effort was provided by the Women's Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. These women, each of whom had already obtained their pilot's license prior to service, became the first women to fly American military aircraft. They ferried planes from factories to bases, transporting cargo and participating in simulation strafing and target missions, accumulating more than 60 million miles in flight distances and freeing thousands of male U.S. pilots for active duty in World War II. More than 1,000 WASPs served, and 38 of them lost their lives during the war. Considered civil service employees and without official military status, these fallen WASPs were granted no military honors or benefits, and it wasn't until 1977 that the WASPs received full military status. On March 10, 2010, at a ceremony in the Capitol, the WASPS received the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest civilian honors. More than 200 former pilots attended the event, many wearing their World War II-era uniforms.

"Rosie the Riveter"

Though women had been joining the work force in greater numbers since the hardships of The Great Depression, the entry of the United States into World War II completely transformed the types of jobs open to women. Before the war, most working women were in traditionally female fields like nursing and teaching. Post- Pearl Harbor, women worked in a variety of positions previously closed to them, though the aviation industry saw the greatest increase in female workers. More than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry in 1943, representing 65 percent of the industry's total workforce (compared to just 1 percent in the pre-war years). The munitions industry also heavily recruited women workers, as represented by the U.S. government's "Rosie the Riveter" propaganda campaign. Based in small part on a real-life munitions worker, but primarily a fictitious character, the strong, bandanna-clad Rosie became one of the most successful recruitment tools in American history, and the most iconic image of working women during World War II.

In movies, newspapers, posters, photographs, articles and even a Norman Rockwell-painted Saturday Evening Post cover, the Rosie the Riveter campaign stressed the patriotic need for women to enter the work force-and they did, in huge numbers. Though women were crucial to the war effort, their pay continued to lag far behind their male counterparts: Female workers rarely earned more than 50 percent of male wages.

Working Conditions For Women in World War II

With many fathers off fighting, mothers were faced with the burden of balancing childcare and work, and absenteeism became the symptom that caused factory owners-and the United States government-to finally acknowledge the issue. The Lanham Act or 1940 gave war-related government grants for childcare services in communities where defense production was a major industry. In 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in, encouraging her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to pass the Community Facilities Act, which led to the creation of the first U.S. government-sponsored childcare center. Roosevelt also urged for reforms like staggered working hours at factories to allow working mothers to go to grocery stores-stores that were often either closed or out of stock by the time women clocked out of work.

Not all women were treated equally in the workplace. African American women found that white women were not always welcoming at work-if they were even granted the same job opportunities in the first place-and were paid less than their white peers. Japanese American women fared even worse, as they were sent off to Japanese Internment Camps under Executive Order 9066.

Though women, as a whole, had access to more jobs than ever before, they were paid far less than men (roughly half, in most cases), and most found themselves pressured to relinquish jobs to the male soldiers returning home at war's end. But something had permanently shifted: World War II empowered women to seek new opportunities and fight for equal pay in the decades to come.

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Some 350,000 women served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II, both at home and abroad. They included the Women's Airforce Service Pilots, who on March 10, 2010, were awarded the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal. Meanwhile, widespread male enlistment left gaping holes in the industrial labor force and defense industry.

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Alice Munro, In Her Own Words: 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

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Women had the roles of house keeping, cooking, and cleaning. Men had the outside of the house roles.

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By Lily Kongslien
Special to the Star Journal

I recall the silver fox farm our family operated in the 1920's and 30s. Silver fox farming began around 1890 on Prince Edward Island with the scientific breeding of the first true silver foxes. Trappers had found the first black and silver-haired pups in the litters of common red foes. This first breeding of silver foxes was successful and pairs of live foxes were much in demand as a good pair was worth thousands of dollars. The pelts were rare and had a brilliance and sheen that made them special prizes.

My father worked at the Carroll fox farm in the early 20s; he got his first several pairs of foxes from Don Carroll and began what we called the Northwoods Silver Fox Farm along the Wisconsin River. At the time there were several silver fox farms in our immediate area and the climate was ideal for fur farms. The Fromm brothers operated a large silver fox farm south of Wausau. My father purchased breeding stock from them.

On a sliver fox farm, there was the large yard area surrounded by wire fence complete with over-hang for security, as foxes are wild animals and can climb and dig. They do not become pets - they snarl and yap at strangers and even at those of us who worked with them. Inside the yard area there were individual pens made of galvanized mesh wire and two-by-fours; a complete wire cage having a dirt floor over the bottom wire. Each pen had a nesting box for bad weather, warmth in winter and a house for the mother and young pups in the spring, When the fox is mature, about two years old, they were put into special mating pens where they stayed together until the female became heavy with young, then she was placed in a special pen so watch could be kept. Here she awaited the birth of three to six pups, born in early spring. As these pups represented investment and profit for the fix farmer, great care was taken to raise them safely to adulthood. Once in a while the mother fox would carry the small sightless pups out of the nesting box onto the snow and abandon them. This is when we would make a quick search for a nursing mother cat who would nurse the abandoned pups until they were eight or nine weeks old. When the pups could eat solid food and drink milk from a dish they were placed into a pen in the fox yard to get strong and eventually become breeding stock. The pens within the yard were arranged so they could be numbered and there was a path between for easy cleaning and feeding. One main gate in the guard fence was for entrance into the general pen areas and was locked at night.

In the fall the silver fox fur was prime so they were killed for the fur and when cured, the furs were sold to various furriers in New York and to local buyers. To produce the best and most silver on the long fur, the foxes needed a special diet of cereal, meat, fish and lots of fresh water. Horsemeat was also fed to the foxes almost daily, plus meals containing liver and heart meat.

It was a sorry day after the market price and demand for furs went down. We decided all of the foxes would have to go since, with the Depression in full force, it was impossible to feed them and realize we'd have enough money from the pelts to break even financially. This was the end of an era. Our fur farm became just a farm with a few cows, calves and chickens. It was a very hard time for my father, as he had put many years of his life, and much of the income received, into his fur farm. While it was the end of fox farming, the era continues to provide great memories.

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I recall the silver fox farm our family operated in the 1920's and 30s. Silver fox farming began around 1890 on Prince Edward Island with the scientific breeding of the first true silver foxes. Trappers had found the first black and silver- ...

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Munro writes stories about everyday people and ordinary events that trigger flashes of insight. Here the narrator is unnamed, possibly because her identity is determined so fully by her gender. Interestingly, her brother’s name, Laird (a Scottish word for “lord”), also reveals his status in a sexist society. Other small details reveal Munro’s vision of the splits between men and women, nature and civilization, and wealth and poverty. The “heroic” calendars on the wall depict noble savages exploited by whites, Henry sings a racist song, and wealthy women who are far away will wear the furs that are bought with the deaths of the foxes and horses. http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=2&sid=b6e3ddd8-6d15-4b6a-b56d-1ceedf826857%40sessionmgr4008&hid=4104&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=103331MSS11539620000051&db=mjh

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A reading of the short story " Boys and Girls " written by Alice Munro and read by Michael DuBon Full Text: http://www.giuliotortello.it/shortstories/boys_and_girls.pdf

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The announcement that this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called “our Chekhov.” All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are “our Chekhov.” But Alice Munro really is our Chekhov—which is to say, the English language’s Chekhov. (In Munro’s great story, “The Beggar Maid,” an ambitious man sees that a friend of the woman he is courting “mispronounced Metternich,” and says indignantly to her: “How can you be friends with people like that?” I’m put in mind of Chekhov’s story “The Russian Master,” which has a character who repeatedly torments a young teacher by asking him why he has “never read Lessing.”)
(Anton Chekhov is amongst the best short fictions writers in history.)

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The announcement that this year's Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called "our Chekhov." All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are "our Chekhov." But Alice Munro really is our Chekhov-which is to say, the English language's Chekhov. (In Munro's great story, "The Beggar Maid," an ambitious man sees that a friend of the woman he is courting "mispronounced Metternich," and says indignantly to her: "How can you be friends with people like that?" I'm put in mind of Chekhov's story "The Russian Master," which has a character who repeatedly torments a young teacher by asking him why he has "never read Lessing.")

Yet many of Munro's readers had sadly concluded that she was not, somehow, the kind of writer that the Nobel committee seemed to like; I had decided that she would join the list of noble non-Nobelists, a distinguished category that includes Tolstoy, Nabokov, Borges, Hrabal, Sebald, Bernhard, Ingmar Bergman-and Chekhov, as it happens.

We were wrong, and for once it was wonderful to be wrong. Greatly enjoying being wrong, I spent an hour yesterday rereading one of Munro's finest stories, " The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which appeared in this magazine. It tells the story of Grant and Fiona, who have been married for many years. Grant has been a professor, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic literature, Fiona a hospital administrator. In their old age, Fiona begins to develop signs of serious dementia, and Grant has her placed in a local nursing home, Meadowlake. The marriage has been a happy one, or so Grant feels, despite the fact that he has been a considerable philanderer: "He had never stopped making love to Fiona in spite of disturbing demands elsewhere. He had not stayed away from her for a single night." And just as he has been, in his way, devoted to his wife, so Fiona never strayed from him. It was never, despite Grant's many infidelities, an open marriage. She put up with his adventures.

On the morning of his first visit to the nursing home, after a month's separation from Fiona, Grant is "full of a solemn tingling, as in the old days on the morning of his first planned meeting with a new woman." Fiona has not quite forgotten Grant (this is his great anxiety), but she has found a new friend in the nursing home, a man of about Grant's age, named Aubrey, wonderfully described as having "something of the beauty of a powerful, discouraged, elderly horse. But where Fiona was concerned, he was not discouraged." Grant is naturally jealous, but his love for Fiona is protective, and over the next weeks he begins to adapt to the new happiness that Fiona has clearly found with Aubrey: "He didn't see much point in mentioning their marriage, now." When Aubrey-who was only a temporary resident-leaves the nursing home to return to life with his younger wife, Fiona is distraught, and Grant decides that he will ask Marian, Aubrey's wife, if she might occasionally let Aubrey visit Fiona. Marian refuses: she doesn't want to upset her bewildered husband. He belongs at home, she says, with her. She says that it was probably a mistake to have put him in the nursing home, even briefly. Grant returns home empty-handed, but he finds a phone message from Marian: Would he like to go with her to "a dance in town at the Legion supposed to be for singles on Saturday night.... I realize you're not a single and I don't mean it that way. I'm not either, but it doesn't hurt to get out once in a while." The old philanderer is interested-partly because a seducer has never retired from the game, but largely because he thinks that this may be the best way to get Marian to let Aubrey visit Fiona in the nursing home. Perhaps Marian will be inclined, once the affair is properly blossoming, to send her husband back there for good?

The story is beautiful in the irony of its symmetries-the philanderer who unexpectedly loses his loyal wife to the love of another man, and then returns to his old erotic ways in order to secure his wife's own continuing infidelity. But two additional elements, both characteristic of Munro's careful art, make it a great story. First, there is Munro's astounding lack of sentimentality-the clear-eyed, utterly unillusioned, bleakly subtle description of the nursing home, its inmates, and its staff. Grant, for instance, becomes reliant on one of the nurses, who has her own problems-an absent husband, four children, one of whom is asthmatic. "To her, Grant and Fiona and Aubrey too must seem lucky. They had got through life without too much going wrong. What they had to suffer now that they were old hardly counted." The second very Munro-ish element is the formal freedom of the story, which compacts a lot of life into a short space, and moves backwards and forwards over a great deal of terrain. Strikingly, the story begins with two paragraphs, subsequently abandoned, about Fiona and Grant as young people, before they were even married, and then vaults silently over fifty years to begin the narrative of Fiona's elderly mental decline. These two first paragraphs are beautifully full of energy and joy and hope; they capture with extraordinary economy the happiness of youth, a happiness largely absent from the rest of the story. This is how "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" begins:

Fiona lived in her parents' house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic-a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant left-wing politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to strange tirades with an absentminded smile. All kinds of people, rich or shabby-looking, delivered these tirades, and kept coming and going and arguing and conferring, sometimes in foreign accents. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn't in a sorority, and this activity in her house was probably the reason.

Because of this sparkling first paragraph, we begin "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" thinking that it will be a story about a young woman's growth, rather than the tale of her decline (albeit a decline that includes a final unexpected love affair). We carry with us, through the sadness of aging and loss, the memory of these devastating opening lines-devastating just because they are not continued, but simply abandoned by Munro at the very start of her tale. The effect is as if Michael Haneke's film "Amour" were to open with a scene in which we see the two elderly protagonists as young unmarried lovers, and then brutally scroll forward five decades.

Throughout her work, Munro is daring in this way-daring with the truth, and daring in her formal choices. At the level of the sentence, her stories proceed within the grammar of conventional realism; but at the formal level, her work invents its own grammar, which is why her stories strike many readers as closer to novellas than to any idea of "the conventional well-made short story." And notice, too, in that opening passage, how gently funny and slyly indirect Munro is: the impressive cardiologist who is subservient at home, happy to listen to "strange tirades with an absent-minded smile"; a household that is mysteriously full of different people, coming and going, all of them delivering "tirades" of one kind or another; and a household that is perhaps more fun to belong to than a sorority. Such life!
Photograph by George Waldman/Corbis.

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The announcement that this year's Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called "our Chekhov." All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are "our Chekhov."

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Alice Munro was born and raised in Ontario.
Picture credit: http://watercanada.net/2014/ontario-named-an-international-water-industry-leader/

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background picture from Museums Victoria Collections