The Bear Came over the Mountain

Alice Munro is a Canadian author whose main body of work focuses on short stories. She is widely celebrated, having won the Nobel Prize for Literature (2013), The Booker International Prize (2009), The Roger Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2004), and the Marian Engel Award (1996). Literary critics have praised Munro for challenging and reshaping how short stories are constructed. Munro writes complex characters who are neither sympathetic nor someone to hate completely. Her stories are character-centered and focus on the intricacies of the human experience, often ending in moral ambiguity.

Her stories are often set in the same place: Huron County, Ontario, in Canada. This consistent setting is part of why her work embodies the Southern Ontario Gothic genre and literary tradition. This is a subgenre of Southern Gothic in Canadian literature that navigates the realism of small towns and moral hypocrisy that can be attributed to many of Munro’s characters. For example, Grant is a morally hypocritical character throughout the narrative. He admits to the reader that he has cheated in the past and deceived