Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 25, 1941. Her parents were Quakers who were active in social causes I the Midwest and the South. After living in several Quaker communities, the Tylers settled in a Quaker commune in Celo, North Carolina for four years.
Tyler helped care for the farm animals and worked in the fields of the organic farm. Instead of attending a traditional public school, she took art lessons, learned carpentry and cooking, and basic elementary education courses in a schoolhouse located in the commune. She took correspondence courses to supplement her education.
According to Tyler, she began telling herself stories at night when she was three. The stories helped her relax and fall asleep. These stories were the beginning of her love of storytelling and eventually writing.
When she was eleven, they moved to Raleigh, North Carolins where she first attended public school. Tyler was academically advanced but felt socially awkward because her rural upbringing was so different from her classmates. However, she loved having access to a well-stocked library,
After graduating high school at sixteen, Tyler wanted to attend Swarthmore College, but she was awarded a full AB scholarship to Duke University. Her parents pressured her to accept the scholarship because it would alleviate some of the financial burden of educating Anne and her three younger brothers.
Tyler wrote several award-winning short stories during her college years. Despite her love of writing, she remained open to other careers. She studied visual arts, painting, drama, and majored in Russian literature. She received a fellowship to graduate school in Slavic Studies at Columbia University. Tyler left and returned to Duke University before completing her master’s thesis. At Duke, she worked in the library as a Russian bibliographer.
Tyler met Taghi Modarressi, a young child psychiatry resident and writer from Iran, in the Duke library. They married seven months later. After Modarressi completed his residency, they moved to Baltimore, Maryland, had two daughters, and remained together until his death. She translated several of her husband’s novels into English.
Most of her stories are set in Maryland.
Tyler dedicated her first published book to her high school English teacher, Mrs. Peacock.
After her daughters were born, she took a break from novel writing and began supplementing the family income by writing reviews and articles for magazines and newspapers. When her children were older, she returned to novel writing. Tyler asserts that her time reading and writing reviews enhanced her storytelling abilities and mad her a better writer.
Anne Tyler has emerged as one of the leading authors of her time. She is known for her imagination, attention to detail, realistic and fully developed characters, and artful use of language.
Her writing has won several National and international awards. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist were finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her novel, Breathing Lessons received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine’s “Book of the Year.” Five of her novels have been adapted to movies. Her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her most recent novel, Three Days in June, was published in 2025.
Selected Works by Anne Tyler:
If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
The Tin Can Tree (1965)
A Slipping-Down Life (1969)
The Clock Winder (1972)
Celestial Navigation (1974)
Searching for Caleb (1975)
Earthly Possessions (1977)
Morgan’s Passing (1980)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Breathing Lessons (1988)
Saint Maybe (1991)
Ladders of Years (1995)
A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Back When We were Grownups (2001)
The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Digging to America 2006)
Noah’s Compass (2009)
The Beginner’s Goodbye (2012)
A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)
Vinegar Girl: William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew Retold (2016)
Clock Dance (2018)
Half-Truths and Other Miracles (2018) Novella
Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)
Teenage Wasteland (2020) Novella
French Braid (2022)
Three Days in June (2025)
Photo Credit:
Photo by Diana Walker – Taken from author’s website, https://anntyler.com