It’s the birthday of Canadian author Alice Munro (b. 1931), who earned her 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature as “a consummate artist who is without question among the most accomplished masters of the short story” (Robert Thacker, “Alice Munro,” from The Nobel Prizes 2013).

Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada, to a fox fur farmer and a schoolteacher. She was an avid reader at a young age (L.M. Montgomery, Dickens) and a writer as well. When she was 12, Munro’s mother began to show signs of Parkinson’s and her father’s business failed. Munro took on more and more responsibility running the house and watching her younger brother and sister, yet graduated high school in 1949 as the class valedictorian.

Munro studied at the University of Western Ontario but left in 1951 before finishing to marry her first husband, James Munro, whom she’d met at school. (Spoiler alert: around that same time she also met Gerald Fremlin, a war veteran and student, who would one day become her second husband.) They moved to Vancouver immediately, then to Victoria in 1963, but Munro would eventually return to Ontario in 1974, setting most of her stories there. Munro and James had four daughters, the second of whom died the day she was born.

James bought Munro a typewriter and Munro worked at her writing while raising her children. She began selling stories to Robert Weaver at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a radio show, Canadian Short Stories; Weaver became an important influence and colleague. Upon moving to Victoria, the Munros opened a bookstore called Munro’s Books, but by the late 60s their marriage was coming apart. Munro’s first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, came out in 1968 and Munro began to get serious attention from the literary community. By 1974 her marriage had ended and she’d returned to Ontario and written a memoir, Home (1974). That same year she reconnected with Gerald Fremlin and moved even closer to her hometown to live with him; they married in 1976.

Munro went on to publish more than 60 stories in The New Yorker and many short story collections, winning a bazillion awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Love of a Good Woman (1998) and the Man Booker International Prize in 2009. (I am currently cheating by reading a collection called Alice Munro’s Best: Selected Stories, 2006, with an introduction by Margaret Atwood.) Her 14th and most recent collection, Dear Life, came out in 2012. Munro claims it is also her last and that she has stopped writing. She is 87 years old, so…fair enough.

The bookstore Munro established with her first husband is still going strong.

Have a solidly good Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.