In version B, Mary and John have an affair. All in all, they live comfortable, fulfilling lives. They get married, enjoy their jobs, buy a nice home, and start a family. In this version, John and Mary fall in love. Each of the six versions of the story that follow present a different scenario of what happens to the couple. Plot SummaryĪt the beginning of “Happy Endings,” John and Mary meet. Her versatility and her controversiality as a writer, combined with her literary activism, have made her a significant cultural force in Canada. She has won many awards throughout her long career. She has taught several creative writing and literature classes at various American and Canadian universities.Ītwood remains one of Canada’s most well-known literary personalities. She has also edited several anthologies and been involved with a publishing venture. Since the mid-1960s, Atwood has produced a steady string of publications, including novels, poetry collections, short stories, children’s books, and nonfiction.
Her poetry helped develop her reputation as an important Canadian writer, but Atwood quickly branched out into other forms of writing. In 1966, her poetry volume The Circle Game was published, and it won Canada’s Governor General’s Award the following year. From 1967 through 1970, Atwood taught at several different Canadian universities. She taught English from 1964 to 1965 at the University of British Columbia, then returned to Harvard and eventually completed all the requirements for her doctorate except for the dissertation. However, in 1963, she left Harvard and returned to Canada to focus her attention on Canadian literature. from Harvard in 1962 and began to work toward her Ph.D. She also won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study English at Radcliffe College, which is part of Harvard University. In the year of her graduation from Victoria College, Atwood won the E. As a young poet, she was an active member of the literary scene, which included giving readings at coffeehouses and contributing reviews, poems, and parodies to the college newspaper. While attending Victoria College, University of Toronto, from 1957 to 1961, she wrote for the newspaper and the dramatic society. She wrote prose and poetry for her high school’s literary magazine. These early experiences away from urban society encouraged Atwood to read and develop her imagination.Īs a child, Atwood composed and illustrated poems, which she collected into small books. Her family spent the school year in Ottawa and Toronto, where her father taught entomology or worked for government agencies, and summers in northern Quebec and Ontario where her father conducted research.
Her childhood was divided between the city and the country. Margaret Atwood was born on November 18,1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. At the same time, she challenges other writers to more closely examine typical literary convention. She defined the artist, in part, as “the guardian of the moral and ethical sense of the community.” In “Happy Endings,” Atwood fulfills this role with a challenge that she throws out to those writers who rely on the stereotypical characterization of men and women and to the reader who accepts such gender typing. In earlier works, including the novel Bodily Harm, as well as speeches, Atwood discusses the writer’s relationship to society. In several thumbnail sketches of different marriages, all of which achieve a traditional “happy ending,” Atwood references both the mechanics of writing, most particularly plot, and the effects of gender stereotyping. “Happy Endings,” which is essentially a self-referential story framework, falls into the third category. Subtitled “Short Fiction and Prose Poems,” Murder in the Dark featured four types of works: autobiographical sketches, travel notes, experimental pieces addressing the nature of writing, and short pieces dealing with typical Atwood themes, notably the relationship between the sexes. Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” first appeared in the 1983 Canadian collection, Murder in the Dark, and it was published in 1994 for American audiences in Good Bones and Simple Murders.
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