Mavis Gallant

Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant, , née Young (11 August 1922 – 18 February 2014), was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays.

Personal life

Gallant was born in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Albert Stewart Roy de Trafford Young, a Canadian furniture salesman and painter who was the son of an officer in the British Army, and his wife, Benedictine Wiseman. Young died in 1932 of kidney disease, and his widow soon remarried and moved to New York, leaving their daughter behind with a guardian. Gallant did not learn of her father's death for several years and later told ''The New York Times'': "I had a mother who should not have had children, and it's as simple as that.""Mavis Gallant, 91, Dies; Her Stories Told of Uprooted Lives and Loss"
''The New York Times'', February 18, 2014.

Gallant was educated at 17 public, private, and convent schools in the United States and Canada. She spent most of the years 1935–1940 in and around New York City, the setting for many of her earlier stories.

She married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician, in 1942. The couple divorced in 1947. According to Gallant's biographer, the marriage was "briefer than the dates suggest since her husband was in the armed forces overseas for much of the time".

Career

In her 20s, Gallant briefly worked for the National Film Board"Mavis Gallant, legendary short story writer, dies at 91"
''Toronto Star'', February 18, 2014. before taking a job as a reporter for the ''Montreal Standard'' (1944–1950). While working for the ''Standard'', she published some of her early short stories, both in the newspaper and in the magazines ''Preview'' and ''Northern Review''."Mavis Gallant, short story maven, dies at 91"
CBC News, February 18, 2014.

Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing full-time. She moved to Europe with the hope of being able to work exclusively as a writer rather than supporting herself with other work, and lived briefly in Spain before settling in Paris, France, where she resided for the remainder of her life. Despite residing in Paris, Gallant never surrendered her Canadian citizenship nor applied for French citizenship.

Her first internationally published short story, "Madeline's Birthday", appeared in the September 1, 1951 issue of ''The New Yorker''. The magazine soon published other stories of hers, including "One Morning in June" and "The Picnic".Gallant, Mavis
"The Hunger Diaries"
''The New Yorker'', July 9, 2012. She did not initially know these later stories had been accepted by the magazine, as her literary agent, Jacques Chambrun, pocketed her $1,535 in royalties and told her the magazine had declined her stories, while simultaneously lying about her residence to the magazine so they could not contact her directly; she discovered that she had been published only upon seeing her name in the magazine while reading it in a library, and thus established her longstanding relationship with the magazine by directly contacting and befriending ''New Yorker'' fiction editor William Maxwell. Chambrun had also embezzled money from W. Somerset Maugham, Ben Hecht, Grace Metalious, and Jack Schaefer, among others.

She published 116 stories in ''The New Yorker'' throughout her career, putting her in the same league as John Cheever or John Updike. Alongside Alice Munro, Gallant is one of only a few Canadian authors whose works have regularly appeared in the magazine.

She wrote two novels, ''Green Water, Green Sky'' (1959) and ''A Fairly Good Time'' (1970); a play, ''What Is to Be Done?'' (1984); numerous celebrated collections of stories, ''The Other Paris'' (1956), ''My Heart Is Broken'' (1964), ''The Pegnitz Junction'' (1973), ''The End of the World and Other Stories'' (1974), ''From the Fifteenth District'' (1979), ''Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories'' (1981), ''Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris'' (1985), ''In Transit'' (1988) and ''Across the Bridge'' (1993); and a non-fiction work, ''Paris Notebooks: Selected Essays and Reviews'' (1986). Numerous new collections of stories from the earlier books, including ''The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant'' (1996), ''Paris Stories'' (2002) and ''Varieties of Exile'' (2003), were also released in the 1990s and 2000s. ''The Cost of Living'' (2009) collected stories from throughout her career, which had been published in literary magazines but not in earlier collections.Knelman, Martin
"How Mavis Gallant avoided her own death in Paris"
''Toronto Star'', April 15, 2009. Her "Linnet Muir" series of stories, which appeared in several of her books before being collected in their entirety in ''Home Truths'', are her most explicitly semi-autobiographical works.

Throughout Gallant's early career, Canadian literary critics often wrote of her as being unfairly overlooked in Canada because of her expatriate status; prior to the 1970s, in fact, her books were not picked up by Canadian publishers at all, and were available only as rare and expensive American importsFulford, Robert, "A life spent abroad: Mavis Gallant's relationship with Canada was once one of mutual neglect". ''National Post'', April 20, 2004. until Macmillan of Canada bought publication rights to ''From the Fifteenth District''."Mysterious Mavis"
. CanWest News Service, April 30, 2006. According to journalist Robert Fulford, the neglect flowed in both directions, as Gallant did not actually undertake any serious effort to secure a Canadian publisher until Macmillan editor Douglas Gibson approached her in the late 1970s. The Canadian publication of ''From the Fifteenth District'' did not initially quell the criticism, however, as the book failed to garner a shortlisted nomination for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction

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