Five books published in fourteen years have firmly established Alice Munro among Canada's best writers of prose fiction. Her form is the short story, and her material is largely the experience of a girl growing up poor in a small southwestern Ontario town and subsequently making her way, with pain, self-awareness, and amazement, through the various passages of life: school, leaving home, university, marriage, children, divorce, making a career, and establishing new relationships. Munro's talent lies in presenting these ordinary experiences so that they appear extraordinary, invested with a kind of magic.

Munro, the daughter of Robert Eric Laidlaw and Ann Chamney Laidlaw, was born in Wingham, Ontario, in 1931. Alice Anne Laidlaw started writing stories when she was about fifteen. Because she lived on the outskirts of town, not quite town but not yet country, she could not go home for lunch. She spent her noon hours locked...