Alice Munro's legacy with the New Yorker
Joe Cummings | CBC News | Posted: May 14, 2024 5:33 PM | Last Updated: May 14
How the Canadian who wrote about small-town lives became synonymous with the quintessentially urban magazine
In April 1977, the New Yorker magazine published its first Alice Munro short story, titled Royal Beatings. Within a matter of months, Munro had signed a "first-reading agreement" with the New Yorker that put the magazine first in line to publish her stories ahead of any other publication.
It was the birth of a literary relationship that would span decades and see the New Yorker publish more than 60 of her stories or personal histories.
Ultimately, Munro, who has died at the age of 92, would become what longtime readers of the magazine like to call "a New Yorker writer."
It's an unofficial designation, but one that is understood to include some of the most highly regarded and accomplished practitioners of English-language short fiction: John O'Hara, James Thurber, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, Maeve Brennan, John Updike, Mavis Gallant (Munro's fellow Canadian) and Donald Barthelme, to name a few.
Because of their regular appearances in the magazine, these writers are synonymous with the New Yorker's celebrated commitment to the art form.
In an interview with CBC, New Yorker editor David Remnick said Munro's inclusion was only natural.
"To be honest, once you know you have a great talent, it doesn't take a genius to publish her. You keep the doors open, and when she wants to walk through, you greet her with all the enthusiasm you can muster," Remnick said.
"I don't know if there was ever a more important writer to the New Yorker than Alice Munro."
WATCH | Alice Munro on the art of storytelling:
The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, told CBC that Munro remained an important contributor throughout her career, because over the years her stories became "richer and deeper ... pushing further and further into ... how we connect to others, of how we see ourselves, reveal ourselves, lie to ourselves."
Remnick agrees.
"Munro was an astonishing portraitist of human feelings, emotions, connection and disconnection," he said. "And ultimately, after years of progressing, I can't think of anyone who offered a deeper insight into the emotional universe of a human being."
Charles McGrath, Munro's first editor at the New Yorker, spoke to Robert Thacker about her relationship with the magazine for his 2011 biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives.
"It's sort of odd and ironic that this Canadian writer would become a New Yorker mainstay," he said.
Odd and ironic, because Munro's writing, featuring Canadian characters in small-town Canadian settings, somehow fit seamlessly into this quintessentially urban American magazine.
However, according to Treisman, you aren't reading about Canada when you're reading an Alice Munro story.
"What's significant in Munro's work has little to do with where it's set," she said.
While New Yorker readers were regularly being offered the very best of Munro, many in Canada's literary community point out that it didn't take an American magazine (no matter how influential) to deliver the author's talents to Canadians.
Linda Warley, an associate professor emerita at the University of Waterloo's department of English language and literature, says Munro's fiction is deeply ingrained in Canada's culture and education system.
"The CBC played a big part in that when Robert Weaver championed Canadian authors on his radio shows and published their work in anthologies and literary journals," she said, noting that Munro's Lives of Girls and Women "might be the Canadian equivalent of Catcher in the Rye. It would be hard to find a Canadian who had not read her work."
Meanwhile, back at the New Yorker, where her writing was so warmly embraced, how was Munro the person received around the magazine's Manhattan headquarters?
"We rarely saw her," Remnick said. "She rarely came to New York. I've been editing the magazine for more than 20 years and I probably met her three times. But trust me, each time it was special. She was lovely, absolutely lovely."
FROM THE ARCHIVES | Munro on writing about women:
For Treisman, her relationship with Munro was always professional, but friendly, too.
"She wasn't a bubbly, confessional type — she was private, to some extent, and work-oriented with me," she said.
"Always responsive and friendly and always ready to talk things through and laugh about things and laugh at herself. I liked her enormously. And I deeply respected her."
But Munro's legacy at the New Yorker will always go far beyond just the personal, according to Remnick.
"If there's any justice," he said, "any competent history of the New Yorker has to include that it was among the magazine's greatest privileges to publish Alice Munro's work. She is among the New Yorker's finest writers."