Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-five novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020.

She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail",

Tyler has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others.

Early life and education

Early childhood

The oldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South. Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville. The Celo Community settlement was populated largely by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends. Tyler lived there from age seven through eleven and helped her parents and others care for livestock and organic farming. While she did not attend formal public school in Celo, lessons were taught in art, carpentry, and cooking in homes and in other subjects in a tiny school house. Her early informal training was supplemented by correspondence school.

Her first memory of her own creative story-telling was of crawling under the bed covers at age three and "telling myself stories in order to get to sleep at night." This early perception of changes over time is a theme that reappears in many of her novels decades later, just as The Little House itself appears in her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Tyler also describes reading Little Women 22 times as a child.

Tyler felt herself to be an outsider in the public schools she attended in Raleigh, a feeling that has followed her most of her life. "Mrs. Peacock" had previously taught the writer Reynolds Price, under whom Tyler would later study at Duke University. Peacock would also later teach the writer Armistead Maupin. Seven years after high school, Tyler would dedicate her first published novel to "Mrs. Peacock, for everything you've done." However, she had won a full AB Duke scholarship to Duke University, and her parents pressured her to go to Duke because they needed to save money for the education of her three younger brothers. At Duke, Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price's first creative writing class, which also included a future poet, Fred Chappell. Price was most impressed with the sixteen-year-old Tyler, describing her as "frighteningly mature for 16," "wide-eyed," and "an outsider." She majored in Russian Literature at Duke and graduated in 1961, at age nineteen, having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. With her Russian Literature background she received a fellowship to graduate school in Slavic Studies at Columbia University. Afterwards he proceeded to take an interest in her work and reviewed her next four novels as well.

National recognition

With her next novel, Tyler truly arrived as a recognized artist in the literary world. Tyler's ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which she considers her best work, Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985, the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. It was also made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. The critical and commercial success of the film further increased the public awareness of her work. Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine's "Book of the Year".

Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Tyler has written 13 more novels; many have been Book of the Month Club main selections and have become New York Times Bestsellers. Ladder of Years was chosen by Time as one of the ten best books of 1995. A Patchwork Planet was a New York Times Notable Book (1999). Saint Maybe (1991) and Back When We Were Grownups (2001) were adapted into TV movies in 1998 and 2004, respectively. In her 2006 novel Digging to America, she explored how an immigrant from Iran, who has lived in the U. S. for 35 years, deals with her "outsiderness," perspectives with which Tyler is familiar due to her marriage to Iranian psychiatrist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi.

In addition to her novels, Tyler has published short stories in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, and Harper's, but they have never been published as a collection. After a year and a half internship in Wichita, Kansas, he obtained a residency in child psychiatry at Duke University Medical School. There he met Tyler and discovered their common interest in literature. In the 1980s, Modarressi founded the Center for Infant Study in Baltimore and the Cold Spring Family Center Therapeutic Nursery in Pimlico, Maryland, which dealt with children who had experienced emotional trauma. who painted the cover of her mother's novel, Ladder of Years.

Tyler resides in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, where most of her novels are set. Today tourists can even take an "Anne Tyler tour" of the area. In 2015, she discussed her 20th novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, in a live radio interview with Diane Rehm and callers on The Diane Rehm Show. In 2025, she gave an interview for CBS Sunday Morning conducted by Robert Costa.

Writing style, influences, and philosophy

Classification of her literature

Tyler has occasionally been classified as a "Southern author" or a "modern American author." The Southern category apparently results from the fact that she grew up and went to college in the South. Also, she admired and/or studied under well-known Southern authors Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price. In a rare interview with The New York Times, Tyler cited Eudora Welty as a major literary influence: "Reading Eudora Welty when I was growing up showed me that very small things are often really larger than the large things". However, poet and author Katha Pollitt notes, "It is hard to classify Anne Tyler's novels. They are Southern in their sure sense of family and place but lack the taste for violence and the Gothic that often characterizes self-consciously southern literature. They are modern in their fictional techniques, yet utterly unconcerned with contemporary moment as a subject, so that, with only minor dislocations, her stories could just as well have taken place in the twenties or thirties."

It is also difficult to classify Tyler in terms of themes; as she herself notes, "I don't think of my work in terms of themes. I'm just trying to tell a story." Tyler goes on to say, "Any large 'questions of life' that emerge in my novels are accidental—not a reason for writing the novel in the first place but either (1) questions that absorb my characters, quite apart from me, or (2) on occasion, questions that may be thematic to my own life at the moment, even if I'm not entirely aware of them. Answers, if they come, come from the characters' experiences, not from mine, and I often find myself viewing those answers with a sort of distant, bemused surprise." In 1976, Pollitt described her skill in this way: "Tyler [is] polishing brighter and brighter a craft many novelists no longer deem essential to their purpose: the unfolding of character through brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail." Kakutani later went on to note that "each character in Saint Maybe has been fully rendered, fleshed out with a palpable interior life, and each has been fit, like a hand-sawed jigsaw-puzzle piece, into the matrix of family life." Carol Shields, also writing about her characters, observes: "Tyler has always put her characters to work. Their often humble or eccentric occupations, carefully observed and threaded with humor, are tightly sewn to the other parts of their lives, offering them the mixed benefit of tedium and consolation, as well as a lighted stage for the unfolding of their dramatic selves. She also allows her men and women an opportunity for redemption."

Tyler has spoken about the importance of her characters to her stories: "As far as I'm concerned, character is everything. I never did see why I have to throw in a plot, too." Reviewer Tom Shone put it this way: "You're involved before you ever notice you were paying attention." Joyce Carol Oates, in her review of The Amateur Marriage, perhaps described the phenomenon best: "When the realistic novel works its magic, you won't simply have read about the experiences of fictitious characters, you will have seemed to have lived them; your knowledge of their lives transcends their own, for they can only live in chronological time. The experience of reading such fiction when it's carefully composed can be breathtaking, like being given the magical power of reliving passages of our own lives, indecipherable at the time of being lived."

Focus on family and marriage

While Tyler herself does not like to think of her novels in terms of themes, numerous reviewers and scholars have noted the importance of family and marriage relationships to her characters and stories. Liesl Schillinger summarized: "Taken together, the distinct but overlapping worlds of her novels have formed a Sensurround literary record of the 20th century American family—or, at least, of the proud but troubled archetypal families that ... interested her most." New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani has been reviewing Tyler's novels for over 25 years. She has frequently noted Tyler's themes with regard to family and marriage. Reviewing Noah's Compass, Kakutani states that "the central concern of most of this author's characters has always been their need to define themselves in terms of family—the degree to which they see themselves as creatures shaped by genetics, childhood memories and parental and spousal expectations, and the degree to which they are driven to embrace independent identities of their own.". This is an example of where Anne Tyler got some of her characteristics from, being able to be independent and get to know herself through her writing.

Reviewing Saint Maybe, Jay Parini describes how Tyler's characters must deal with "Ms. Tyler's oddball families, which any self-respecting therapist would call 'dysfunctional' ... An inexplicable centripetal force hurls these relatives upon one another, catches them in a dizzying inward spiral of obligation, affection and old-fashioned guilt—as well as an inexpressible longing for some perfect or "normal" family in a distant past that never really was. Almost every novel by Anne Tyler begins with a loss or absence that reactivates in the family some primordial sense of itself." Larry McMurtry wrote, "in book after book, siblings are drawn inexorably back home, as if their parents or (more often) grandparents had planted tiny magnets in them which can be activated once they have seen what the extrafamilial world is like. ... sooner or later a need to be with people who are really familiar – their brothers and sisters – overwhelms them."

Novelist Julia Glass has similarly written about Tyler's characters' families: "What makes each story distinctive is the particular way its characters rebel against hereditary confines, cope with fateful crises or forge relationships with new acquaintances who rock their world." In the same way, Glass mentions the frequent role of marriage struggles in her work: "Once again, Tyler exhibits her genius for the incisive, savory portrayal of marriage, of the countless perverse ways in which two individuals sustain a shared existence."

Criticism

Tyler is not without her critics. The most common criticism is that her works are "sentimental," "sweet," and "charming and cosy." The Observers Adam Mars-Jones stated, in his review of The Amateur Marriage: "Tyler seems to be offering milk and cookies." Kakutani has also occasionally bemoaned a "cloying cuteness," noting that "her novels—with their eccentric heroes, their homespun details, their improbable, often heartwarming plots—have often flirted with cuteness."

In a 2012 interview, Tyler responded to such criticisms: "For one thing I think it is sort of true. I would say: piss and vinegar for [Philip] Roth—and, for me, milk and cookies. I can't deny it ... [However] there's more edge under some of my soft language than people realize."

  • Vinegar Girl (2016)
  • Clock Dance (2018)
  • Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)
  • French Braid (2022)
  • Three Days in June (2025)

Other

  • Tumble Tower (1993) A children's book illustrated by her daughter Mitra Modarressi
  • Timothy Tugbottom Says No! (2005) A children's book illustrated by Mitra Modarressi

Short stories

Although Tyler's short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, and Harper's, they have not been published as a collection. Her stories include:

  • "Laura," Archive, March 1959
  • "Lights on the River," Archive, October 1959
  • "The Bridge," Archive, March 1960
  • "I Never Saw Morning," Archive, April 1961
  • "The Baltimore Birth Certificate," The Critic, February–March 1963
  • "I Play Kings," Seventeen, August 1963
  • "A Street of Bugles," The Saturday Evening Post, November 30, 1963
  • "Nobody Answers the Door," The Antioch Review 24.3, Autumn 1964
  • "Dry Water," The Southern Review, Spring 1965
  • "I'm Not Going to Ask You Again," Harper's, September 1965
  • "The Saints in Caesar's Household," Archive, September 1966
  • "As the Earth Gets Old," The New Yorker, October 29, 1966
  • "Two People and a Clock on the Wall," The New Yorker, November 19, 1966
  • "The Tea-Machine," The Southern Review 3.1, Winter 1967
  • "The Genuine Fur Eyelashes," Mademoiselle, January 1967
  • "The Tea-Machine," The Southern Review, Winter 1967
  • "The Feather Behind the Rock," The New Yorker, August 12, 1967
  • "A Flaw in the Crust of the Earth," The Reporter, November 2, 1967
  • "Who Would Want a Little Boy?" Ladies Home Journal, May 1968
  • "The Common Courtesies," McCall's, June 1968—and The O. Henry Prize Stories 1969
  • "With All Flags Flying," Redbook, June 1971—and The O. Henry Prize Stories 1972
  • "Outside," Southern Review 7.4, Autumn 1971
  • "The Bride in the Boatyard," McCall's, June 1972
  • "Respect," Mademoiselle, June 1972
  • "A Misstep of the Mind," Seventeen, October 1972
  • "Spending," Shenandoah, Winter 1973
  • "The Base-Metal Egg," The Southern Review, Summer 1973
  • "Neutral Ground," Family Circle, November 1974
  • "Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles," Cosmopolitan, December 1974
  • "A Knack for Languages," The New Yorker, January 13, 1975
  • "The Artificial Family," The Southern Review, Summer 1975
  • "The Geologist's Maid," The New Yorker, July 28, 1975
  • "Some Sign That I Ever Made You Happy," McCall's, October 1975
  • "Your Place Is Empty," The New Yorker, November 22, 1976—and Best American Short Stories 1977
  • "Holding Things Together", The New Yorker, January 24, 1977
  • "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters," The New Yorker, February 28, 1977
  • "Under the Bosom Tree," Archive, Spring 1977
  • "Foot-Footing On," Mademoiselle, November 1977
  • "Uncle Ahmad," Quest, November–December 1977
  • "Teenage Wasteland," Seventeen, November 1983
  • "Rerun," The New Yorker, July 4, 1988
  • "A Woman Like a Fieldstone House," Ladies' Home Journal, August 1989
  • "People Who Don't Know the Answers," The New Yorker, August 26, 1991

Film adaptations

  • The Accidental Tourist (1988)
  • Breathing Lessons (TV) (1994)
  • Saint Maybe (TV) (1998)
  • A Slipping-Down Life (1999)
  • Earthly Possessions (TV) (1999)
  • Back When We Were Grownups (TV) (2004)

Awards

Tyler has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1983.

for Morgan's Passing (1980):

  • Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction
  • nominated, American Book Award for Fiction
  • nominated, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982):

  • Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  • Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Award
  • Finalist, American Book Award for Fiction

for The Accidental Tourist (1985):

  • 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
  • 1986 Ambassador Book Award for Fiction
  • Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

for Breathing Lessons (1988):

  • Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1989)
  • Times "Book of the Year"

for Ladder of Years (1995):

  • Finalist, The Orange Prize for Fiction 1996

for Digging to America (2006):

  • Finalist, The Orange Prize for Fiction 2007

for A Spool of Blue Thread (2015):

  • Finalist, The Man Booker Prize 2015
  • Finalist, The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015

for Redhead By the Side of the Road (2020):

  • Longlist, The Man Booker Prize 2020

for Lifetime achievement:

  • Finalist, The Man Booker International Prize 2011
  • The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence 2012

References

  • Interview
  • Interview on Radio 4
  • In 1980 Tyler described her visit with Eudora Welty, "her crowning influence"
  • Live Radio Interview on Diane Rehm Show
  • Anne Tyler papers, Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester