Alice Munro (née Laidlaw) is a Canadian writer primarily known for her short stories. Her first collection of stories was published as Dance of the Happy Shades. In 2009, Munro won the Man Booker International Prize. That same year, she published the short-story collection Too Much Happiness. In 2013, at age 82, Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature.

   Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction.

   The short story "Boys and Girls" was originally published in 1964 and subsequently in Munro's 1968 collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades.