Alice Munro at 90
Today is Alice Munro's 90th birthday, and her singular, extraordinary career deserves great celebration. Munro's first published story, "The Dimension of Shadow" , appeared (under her name at the time, Alice Laidlaw) in the April 1950 issue of the student literary magazine of the University of Western Ontario, Folio . According to Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives by Robert Thacker, she soon began sending her stories to Robert Weaver ( "the best friend the Canadian short story ever had" ), who ran a radio series on the CBC devoted to Canadian short stories; after rejecting a few, Weaver broadcast a reading of "The Strangers" on October 5, 1951. Weaver encouraged her to keep writing and to submit her work to literary journals. Her first professional appearance in print was with "A Basket of Strawberries" in Mayfair magazine's November 1953 issue. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades , was published in Canada in 1968, in the
