Interviewer: Were you a big reader growing up? What work if any had an influence?
Munro: Reading was my life really until I was thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn't really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal.
Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137, 1994 interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
Munro: Reading was my life really until I was thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn't really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal.
Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137, 1994 interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
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