Mavis Gallant, short-story writer, dies at 91
TORONTO -- Mavis Gallant, the Montreal-born writer who carved out an international reputation as a master short-story author while living in Paris for decades, died Tuesday at age 91, her publisher said.
The bilingual Quebecoise started out as a journalist and went on to publish well over 100 short stories in her lauded career, many of them in The New Yorker magazine and in collections such as "The Other Paris, "Across the Bridge" and "In Transit." Random House in Canada confirmed the death, saying she died in her Paris apartment.
American author Joyce Carol Oates compared Gallant to another Canadian short story master, Alice Munro, who captured the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature.
"Mavis Gallant enormous influence on Alice Munro," Oates wrote on Twitter. "Perhaps the Nobel Prize should have been shared at no loss to two great Canadian writers."
Munro herself said: "Mavis Gallant was a marvelous short story writer and a constant hopeful influence on my life."
Gallant's following in the United States remained small. Many of her books remain out of print, short stories tend not to be best sellers and as a Canadian living in Paris she often wrote about foreign cultures.
After school, she landed an entry-level stint at the National Film Board and then a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard. In 1950, she kept a promise she had made to herself to quit journalism by age 30 -- she was 28. She began traveling Europe, subsisting on her fees from The New Yorker and by giving English lessons.
"I live on bread, wine, and mortadella," she wrote in her diary while in Madrid in 1952, as published by The New Yorker. "Europe for me is governed by the price of mortadella."
She gave herself two years to succeed. She did, beginning a 25-year collaboration with her famous New Yorker editor, author William Maxwell.
"Her voice was a defining one for New Yorker fiction: clear, sharp, penetrating, often breathtaking in its ability to dissect human emotions, motivations, flaws, and moments of grace," New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman said in a statement to The Associated Press. "She was an observer, a portraitist both of social niceties -- no gesture went unnoted -- and of the brutality of what can happen in our own minds."
Gallant felt at home in Europe, gaining acceptance as a writer that she felt she never would have back in Canada, she told a 2006 Bravo! television documentary, "Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant."
"I found for the first time in my life a society where you could say you're a writer and not be asked for three months' rent in advance," she said.
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