Walker Brothers Cowboy by Alice Munro | Introduction & Overview

Walker Brothers Cowboy Introduction

Alice Munro is one of Canada's most renowned contemporary writers. Since the publication of her first volume, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, she has produced several important short story collections. Munro has been called a regional writer because many of her stories are set in rural Ontario during the Depression era, where Munro grew up, and evoke a bygone time of hardship and deprivation. Within this world, however, Munro's central characters often hold on to their sense of wonder and mystery about the world around them, as does the narrator of "Walker Brothers Cowboy." The family of the narrator—a young girl—has lost their fox farm, and her father has been forced to take a job peddling patent medicines, food flavorings, and poisons to the farmers who live in Ontario's backcountry, but the girl still looks deeply at the ordinary world and finds enchantment in it. Like many of...
(read more)