The Alice Munro Papers, First Accession: An Inventory of the Archives at the University of Calgary Libraries

A.T.J. Cairns was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This is the seventh volume of the University of Calgary Press’s Canadian Archival Inventory Series. All seven volumes have been issued in less than one year (1986) and this undertaking seems determined, and likely, to fill all-but-single-handedly the considerable gap in basic research materials on Canadian authors.

The collections of personal papers, notebooks, manuscripts, letters, and editions of many of the best Canadian writers which, for some years now, the Library of the University of Calgary has been acquiring, provides an ideal, wide-ranging, and in-depth source for this series; and with this volume on the papers of Alice Munro, perhaps currently our most celebrated author, editors Jean F. Tener and Apollonia Steele have once more done an excellent job.

The introductory biocritical essay, by Thomas E. Tausky, is succinct, readable, and informative. An archival inventory is followed by a correspondence series (with items from Robert Weaver, George Jonas, Jack McClelland, Desmond Pacey, John Metcalf, and Patrick Watson, among others), a novel series, a collected short story series, an uncollected short story series, a notebook and untitled fragment series, a television series, a poetry series, a nonfiction series, a works on Alice Munro series, and a miscellaneous series.

Designed and laid out with understated elegance, with a type face that is a pleasure to read, this volume is, once again, a credit to everyone involved in its production.