Article content In 1950, 28-year-old Mavis Gallant quit her newspaper job in Montreal and flew to Paris with $500 from the paper’s publisher and high hopes of becoming a full-time author. She never looked back. Over the next half-century, her exquisitely crafted stories of expats, drifters and displaced people in post-Second World War Europe earned her a reputation as the “irrefutable master of the short story in English,” to quote American author and commentator Fran Lebowitz.
Gallant published 116 short stories in The New Yorker, as well as a dozen short-story collections, two novels, a play, essays and diaries. Her work garnered numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award (1981), Companion of the Order of Canada (1993), PEN/Nabokov Award (2004) and Prix Athanase-David (2006). Now, a decade after her death in Paris at 91 , a new book provides the prequel to Gallant’s literary career.
Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant presents 38 of her pieces for the Montreal Standard from 1944 to 1950, selected from among about 125 bylined feature articles. (She wrote an estimated 125 other pieces for the paper, including radio and film reviews.) On topics from refugees to unwed mothers, and from rising stars of Quebec literature to why Canadians are so dull, the articles reveal a budding talent with boundless curiosity and a razor-sharp wit.
Written as Europeans displaced by war were pouring into the city, they explore themes that.