Alice Munro is one of Canada's most critically acclaimed contemporary writers. She is considered a regional writer because her fictions often focus on characters who live in rural Ontario, exploring their lives and culture. Munro has expressed admiration for regional American writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty, and has stated, "If I'm a regional writer, the region I'm writing about has many things in common with the American South.... [It is] Rural Ontario. A closed rural society with a pretty homogenous Scotch-Irish racial strain going slowly to decay." This society forms the core of many of Munro's finest story collections, including Dance of the Happy Shades, Lives of Girls and Women, and Who Do You Think You Are?

"Walker Brothers Cowboy" was published in Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968. Many readers found the story collection conveyed an accurate portrayal of a...