Gallant, Mavis (1922-2014), was a Canadian short-story writer and novelist. Her early stories were collected in The Other Paris (1956) and My Heart Is Broken (1964). They describe people wandering and lost in a world that lacks meaning. Gallant’s first novel, Green Water, Green Sky (1959), describes a suffocating mother-daughter relationship. A Fairly Good Time (1970) concerns a young Canadian woman in France and criticizes certain patterns of French behavior and thought.
Gallant wrote stories about the continuing influence of authoritarian attitudes in everyday German society after World War II ended in 1945. The stories were collected in The Pegnitz Junction (1970) and From the Fifteenth District (1979). A number of partially autobiographical stories were collected in Home Truths (1981). Several Paris stories were collected in Overhead in a Balloon (1985). The stories in Across the Bridge (1993) are set in Quebec and Paris. The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant was published in 1996. A number of her stories set in Europe were collected in Paris Stories (2002). Her The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories was published in 2009. Her essays were published in Paris Notebooks (1986).
Gallant was born on Aug. 11, 1922, in Montreal of English-speaking parents. She traveled to Europe in 1950 and eventually settled in Paris. Gallant died on Feb. 18, 2014.
