SOURCE: McLellan, Dennis. “Pulitzer-Winning Canadian Writer Explored the Lives of Everyday Women.” Los Angeles Times (18 July 2003): B12.

In the following obituary, McLellan provides a brief overview of Shields's life and work.

Carol Shields, an acclaimed Canadian writer whose novel The Stone Diaries earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, has died. She was 68.

Shields, whose novels portrayed ordinary people, particularly women, in everyday situations, died Wednesday in Victoria, Canada, after a long battle with breast cancer.

Born in the United States, Shields was an English graduate of Hanover College in Indiana who moved to Canada as a 22-year-old newlywed in 1957. She raised five children, published two books of poetry and one of criticism and earned a master's degree before her first novel, Small Ceremonies, was published in 1976, when she was 40.

She became one of Canada's most respected writers, known for her stylistic inventiveness.

In all, she wrote 10 novels and...