Mavis Gallant | Short-story master, 91

Mavis Gallant, 91, the Montreal-born writer who carved out an international reputation as a master short-story author while living in Paris for decades, died Tuesday at her apartment.

The bilingual Quebecois started as a journalist and went on to publish well over 100 short stories, many of them in the New Yorker and in collections such as The Other Paris, Across the Bridge, and In Transit.

Author Joyce Carol Oates compared her to another Canadian short-story master, Alice Munro, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature.

"Mavis Gallant enormous influence on Alice Munro," Oates wrote on Twitter. "Perhaps the Nobel Prize should have been shared at no loss to two great Canadian writers."

Munro herself said: "Mavis Gallant was a marvelous short-story writer and a constant hopeful influence on my life."

After graduation, she landed an entry-level stint at the National Film Board and then a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard.

She married musician John Gallant in 1942, but they divorced five years later. In 1950, she kept a promise to quit journalism by age 30 - she was 28. She began traveling Europe, subsisting on fees from the New Yorker and by giving English lessons.

"I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free," she said. "I just held my breath and jumped. I didn't even look to see if there was water in the pool." - AP