Alice Munro was the writer’s writer

Photo by George Waldman 

Alice Munro was the writer’s writer

The Canadian author, who has died at the age of 92, changed literature with her domestic, expansive stories.

By Megan Gibson

“The stories of Alice Munro,” the American writer Ethan Canin is said to have once remarked, “make everyone else’s look like the work of babies.” It is not the highest praise the Canadian writer has ever received – over the course of her decades-long career she drew favourable comparisons to Chekov, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver, and won innumerable prizes, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 – but Canin had a point. Munro, who died on 13 May at the age of 92, in a nursing home in Port Hope, Ontario, after suffering from dementia for more than a decade, was one of the greatest short-story writers to ever live.

All Time 100 Nonfiction Books / No 2 / Black Boy by Richard Wright

 

All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books 

No 002

Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine

Black Boy by Richard Wright

By Megan GibsonAug. 17, 2011

One of the most prominent African-American writers of the 20th century, Richard Wright illuminated and defined midcentury discussions of race in America. Black Boy, his coming-of-age autobiography published in 1945, is divided into two parts: “Southern Night” traces his violent childhood in the segregated South as he grapples with religion, bigotry and family tragedy; “The Horror and the Glory” follows him through young adulthood, his move to Chicago and his initiation into the Communist Party during the Great Depression. Wright soon became disenchanted with the party’s inertia and interparty politics, and he left the fold in 1942. But he held onto his idealistic belief in writing as a vehicle for change — a belief that powers Black Boy, which uses novelistic techniques to chart a young writer’s journey into manhood.

TIME