On Our Minds: Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and grew up in Quaker communes in the Midwest and the South. She received a B.A. from Duke University in 1961 and did a year of graduate study at Columbia University.

She married an Iranian-born psychiatrist and writer in 1963.  They settled in Baltimore, Maryland in 1967. Much of Tyler’s writing is set in the Baltimore area.

Tyler’s work often focuses on the resiliency of the human spirit and how humans deal with the life that fate has dealt them.  Family relationships are frequently central to Tyler’s novels.  She uses family dynamics and simple acts of day-to-day living as a window into the lives of ordinary people.  Her writing has often been compared to iconic Southern writers, including Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.

Tyler’s most notable works include Breathing Lessons, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989, and The Accidental Tourist, a National Book Critics Circle fiction award winner and a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 1985.  The Accidental Tourist was also made into a motion picture starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in 1988.

Source:  Contemporary Authors Online and Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale, 2008.

Other Novels by Anne Tyler

• If Morning Ever Comes
• The Tin Can Tree
• A Slipping-Down Life
• The Clock Winder
• Celestial Navigation
• Searching for Caleb
• Earthly Possessions
• Morgan's Passing
• Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
• The Accidental Tourist
• Breathing Lessons
• Saint Maybe 
• Ladder of Years
• A Patchwork Planet
• Back When We Were Grownups
• The Amateur Marriage

In addition, you can read an interview with her about the book over here.