Montreal Standard Time The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant

Montreal Standard Time is drawn from Mavis Gallant’ s columns in The Montreal Standard during her six-year tenure at the newspaper, beginning in 1944, when she was 22. Gallant reported on an extraordinary range of subjects: labour issues, mining, existentialism, immigration, comedy, mercy killings, feminism, and suffrage. Her journalism is peopled by a rich cast of characters: writers, painters, politicians, criminals, street kids, war brides, refugees, and unwed mothers. Eighty years after they first saw the light, the columns remain as fresh as ever. Written with a precision, flair, and wit that would become her trademark, Montreal Standard Time is journalism of the first order. Taken together, the pieces create a remarkable portrait of Montreal in the eventful years during and after WW2, and of a young woman, fiercely independent and politically active, making her way through it. The book also corrects a long-standing gap in the Gallant oeuvre. Her earliest reporting from The Montreal Standard has never circulated or appeared in book form.

Bill Richardson, a longtime admirer of the writing of Mavis Gallant, began writing about her on Substack in 2022. His books include Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast, I Saw Three Ships, and After Hamelin, a novel for children. He lives in Vancouver. Neil Besner wrote the first PhD on Mavis Gallant’ s work in 1983 at UBC and published the first full-length book on Gallant in 1988. He has written or edited books on Alice Munro and Carol Shields and co-edited anthologies of poetry and short fiction for Oxford. His most recent book is Fishing With Tardelli: A Memoir of Family in Time Lost (2022). Marta Dvorá k, University Professor Emeritus (Sorbonne Nouvelle), is the author of Mavis Gallant: the Eye and the Ear (2019). Mary K. MacLeod is the literary executrix to Mavis Gallant.