Walker Brothers Cowboy

Alice Munro (née Laidlaw) was born in Wingham in Ontario, Canada, on July 10, 1931. Her mother, Anne Laidlaw, left her family farm against her parents’ wishes to pursue an education. She worked as a schoolteacher before marrying Munro’s father, and the couple used her savings to start a fox fur farm on the outskirts of town, which is where Munro was raised.

Although Munro is known for her fiction, critics have noted the memoir-like aspect of much of her writing, for many details from her own life are echoed in her stories. Sometimes these details are very literal, as in “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” in which the narrator’s father is the owner of a failed fox fur farm. Other details, however, are more emotional than literal. In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” for example, the narrator is keenly aware of the strong tension between her mother’s proud desire for affluence and the family’s poverty-stricken, rural lifestyle. This disparity mirrors the issues that Munro faced in her own childhood home, for her mother’s aspirations for a more affluent life alienated the family from the neighbors, leaving Munro feeling isolated from the wider community.

In addition to imbuing her stories with autobiographical details, Munro also brings the landscape of rural Ontario to life in her stories, and this pattern is particularly evident in all of the stories featured in Dance of the Happy Shades. As the events of “Walker Brothers Cowboy” unfold, Munro’s detailed descriptions of the shifting settings create an emotional subtext that punctuates the overt narrative, and this approach is characteristic of all of Munro’s works. The importance of setting is something that she overtly acknowledges as well, for in another of her stories, “Face,” Munro writes, “In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something has happened. And then there are other places which are just other places” (Munro, Alice. “Face.” The New Yorker, 1 Sept. 2008). For Munro, rural Ontario was the place where she experienced her most pivotal life events, and for this reason, she brings this setting to life in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and many of her other stories. As the details of the story unfold, Munro also delves into the larger changes brought on by the Great Depression, and the geographical features of Lake Huron and its surrounding floodplains also feature prominently, shaping the lives and actions of the characters.

Munro’s early life was also shaped by the myriad impacts of the Great Depression on the Canadian economy. While the province of Ontario was hit hard by the Depression, it had more diversity in job opportunities than other provinces farther west. Still, unemployment was widespread, and the quality of life was drastically reduced for families like the Laidlaws during the 1930s. The reality of poverty and the resulting exacerbation of class tensions would profoundly influence Munro’s life and writings. Many of her stories, including “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” examine the ways in which poverty and class tensions influence the interactions that take place in the homes and private lives of her characters. In 2013, Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the greatest in a long list of awards she has received for her writing. This was the first time that the Nobel Prize was awarded to an author who almost exclusively writes short stories.