Mavis Gallant
| Mavis Gallant | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Mavis Leslie de Trafford Young 11 August 1922 Montreal, Quebec |
| Died | 18 February 2014 (aged 91) Paris, France |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Notable works | From the Fifteenth District, The Pegnitz Junction, Home Truths |
| Notable awards |
Order of Canada Governor General's Award for English-language fiction Prix Athanase-David |
| Spouse | John Gallant (m. 1942–1947) |
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant, CC, née Young (11 August 1922 – 18 February 2014), was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays.
Gallant was born in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Albert Stewart Roy de Trafford Young, a Canadian furniture salesman and painter who was the son of an officer in the British Army, and his wife, Benedictine Wiseman. Young died in 1932 of kidney disease, and his wife soon remarried and moved to New York, leaving their daughter behind with a guardian. Gallant did not learn of her father's death for several years and later told The New York Times: "I had a mother who should not have had children, and it’s as simple as that."
Gallant was educated at 17 public, private, and convent schools in the United States and Canada.
She married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician, in 1942. The couple divorced in 1947. The marriage, however, was "briefer than the dates suggest since her husband was in the armed forces overseas for much of the time".
In her 20s, Gallant briefly worked for the National Film Board before taking a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard (1944–1950). While working for the Standard, she published some of her early short stories, both in the newspaper and in the magazines Preview and Northern Review.
Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing full-time. She moved to Europe with the hope of being able to work exclusively as a writer rather than supporting herself with other work, and lived briefly in Spain before settling in Paris, France, where she resided for the remainder of her life. Despite residing in Paris, Gallant never surrendered her Canadian citizenship nor applied for French citizenship.
Her first internationally published short story, "Madeline's Birthday", appeared in the September 1, 1951 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine soon published other stories of hers, including "One Morning in June" and "The Picnic". She did not initially know these later stories had been accepted by the magazine, as her literary agent, Jacques Chambrun, pocketed her $1,535 in royalties and told her the magazine had declined her stories, while simultaneously lying about her residence to the magazine so they could not contact her directly; she discovered that she had been published only upon seeing her name in the magazine while reading it in a library, and thus established her longstanding relationship with the magazine by directly contacting and befriending New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell. Chambrun had also embezzled money from W. Somerset Maugham, Ben Hecht, Grace Metalious, and Jack Schaefer, among others.
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