Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler (born in Minneapolis in 1941) is an American novelist who has published around twenty books, most of them set among ordinary families in Baltimore. Her quiet, observant fiction has made her one of the steadiest voices in American literature from the 1960s onward.

The daughter of an industrial chemist and a social worker, both Quakers active in social causes, she spent part of her childhood in a Quaker community in the mountains of North Carolina, where she did not attend public school. She later said that this early isolation taught her to see the world from a certain distance, something she considers useful for a writer. She studied Russian literature at Duke University, where Reynolds Price was one of her teachers, and then did graduate work in Slavic studies in New York. After marrying an Iranian-born psychiatrist, she settled in Baltimore, which serves as the setting for most of her novels.

Her first novel appeared in 1964, and she has since disowned several of her early books as underdeveloped. Her real breakthrough came with novels such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist, which made her one of the most widely read authors in the country. Her characters are ordinary people, often men, whose small failures and acts of domestic courage reveal a life accumulated over years. Her prose is clear and precise and avoids melodrama. Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989.

Tyler has rarely sought public attention. She avoids long interviews and book tours, preferring to let her books speak for her. Her legacy lies in giving domestic life a narrative dignity that is uncommon, and in showing that the small things can hold an entire life.