Background and career
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", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language." Tyler has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others.
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." Her first book at age seven was a collection of drawings and stories about "lucky girls ... who got to go west in covered wagons." Her favorite book as a child was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. Tyler acknowledges that this book, which she read many times during this period of limited access to books, had a profound influence on her, showing "how the years flowed by, people altered, and nothing could ever stay the same." 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. When the Tyler family left Celo after four years to move to Raleigh, North Carolina, eleven-year-old Tyler had never attended public school and never used a telephone. This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise." 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. She suggests that this sense of being an outsider has contributed to her becoming a writer: "I believe that any kind of setting-apart situation will do [to become a writer]. In my case, it was emerging from the commune ... and trying to fit into the outside world." Despite her lack of public schooling prior to age eleven, Anne entered school academically well ahead of most of her classmates in Raleigh. With access now to libraries, she discovered Eudora Welty, Gabriel García Márquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. Eudora Welty remains one of her favorite writers, and The Wide Net and Other Stories is one of her favorite books; she has called Welty "my crowning influence." She credits Welty with showing her that books could be about the everyday details of life, not just about major events. During her years at Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, she was inspired and encouraged by a remarkable English teacher, Phyllis Peacock. "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." When Tyler graduated from high school at age sixteen, she wanted to attend Swarthmore College, a school founded in 1860 by the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends. 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." Years later Price would describe Tyler as "one of the best novelists alive in the world, ... who was almost as good a writer at 16 as she is now." Tyler took an additional creative writing course with Price and also studied under William Blackburn, who also had taught William Styron, Josephine Humphreys, and James Applewhite at Duke, as well as Price and Chappell. As a college student, Tyler had not yet determined she wanted to become a writer. She loved painting and the visual arts. She also was involved in the drama society in high school and at Duke, where she acted in a number of plays, playing Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Mrs. Gibbs in Our Town. 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. Living in New York City was quite an adjustment for her. There she became somewhat addicted to riding trains and subways: "While I rode I often felt like I was ... an enormous eye taking things in, turning them over and sorting them out ... writing was the only way" [to express her observations]. Tyler left Columbia graduate school after a year, having completed course work but not her master's thesis. She returned to Duke, where she got a job in the library as a Russian bibliographer. It was there that she met Taghi Modarressi, a resident in child psychiatry in Duke Medical School and a writer himself, and they were married seven months later (1963).
While an undergraduate at Duke, Tyler published her short story "Laura" in the Duke literary journal Archive, for which she won the newly created Anne Flexner award for creative writing. In college and prior to her marriage, she wrote many short stories, one of which impressed Reynolds Price so that he later stated that it was the "most finished, most accomplished short story I have ever received from an undergraduate in my thirty years of teaching." "The Saints in Caesar's Household" was published in Archive also and won her a second Anne Flexner award. This short story led to her meeting Diarmuid Russell, to whom Price had sent it with kudos. Russell, who was an agent for both Reynolds Price and for Tyler's "crowning influence" Eudora Welty, later became Tyler's agent. While working at the Duke University library—before and after marrying Modarressi—Tyler did continue to write short stories and started work on her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes. During this period her short stories appeared in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers. After the couple moved to Montreal—Modarressi's U.S. visa had expired and they moved there so he could finish his residency—Tyler continued writing while looking for work. Her first novel was published in 1964 and The Tin Can Tree was published the next year. Years later she disowned both of these novels, as well as many of the short stories she wrote during this period. She has even written that she "would like to burn them." She feels that most of this early work suffers from the lack of thorough character development and her failure to rework material repeatedly. In 1965 at age 24, Tyler had her first child, a daughter they named Tezh. Two years later a second daughter, Mitra, was born. About this time, the couple moved to Baltimore, MD as Taghi had finished his residency and obtained a position at the University of Maryland Medical School. With the moves, the changes in jobs, and the raising of two young children, Tyler had little time or energy for writing and published nothing between 1965 and 1970. She settled comfortably in the city of Baltimore where she has remained and where she has set most of her subsequent novels. Baltimore is generally considered to have a true mix of Southern and Northern culture. It also is an area of considerable Quaker presence, and Tyler eventually enrolled both her daughters in a local Friends school. During this period she began writing literary reviews for journals, newspapers, etc. to provide the family with additional income; she would continue this employment until the late 1980s, writing approximately 250 reviews in total. While this period was not productive for her writing career, Tyler does feel that this time enriched her spirit and her experience and in turn gave her subsequent writing greater depth, as she had "more of a self to speak from." Tyler began writing again in 1970 and had published three more novels by 1974: A Slipping-Down Life, The Clock Winder, and Celestial Navigation. In her own opinion, her writing improved considerably during this period; with her children entering school, she was able to devote a great deal more focus to it than had been possible since she graduated from Duke. With Celestial Navigation, Tyler began to get national recognition: Gail Godwin gave it a very favorable review in the New York Times Review of Books. While she is not proud of her first four novels, Tyler considers this fifth novel one of her favorites. It was a difficult book to write she notes, since it required rewriting draft after draft to truly develop her understanding of the characters. John Updike gave a favorable review to her next novel, Searching for Caleb, writing: "Funny and lyric and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design ... This writer is not merely good, she is wickedly good." Afterwards he proceeded to take an interest in her work and reviewed her next four novels as well. Morgan's Passing (1980) won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction and was nominated for both the American Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Joyce Carol Oates gave it good review in Mademoiselle: "Fascinating ... So unconventional a love story that it appears to take its protagonists themselves by surprise."
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, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, PEN/Faulkner Award, and the American Book Award for Fiction in 1983. In his review in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, "Her art needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully shaped sketches solidity ... In her ninth novel, she has arrived at a new level of power." 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". It was adapted into a 1994 TV movie, as eventually were four other of her novels. 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. Her stories include "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters" (1977), "Holding Things Together" (1977), and "Teenage Wasteland" (1983). Between 1983 and 1996, she edited three anthologies: The Best American Short Stories 1983, Best of the South, and Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade.
In 1963, Tyler married Iranian psychiatrist and novelist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi. Modarressi, ten years her senior, had left Iran and his family as a political refugee at age 25. 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. Modarressi had written two award-winning novels in Persian and so was quite an accomplished writer himself. He later wrote three more novels, two of which Tyler helped to translate to English (The Book of Absent People and The Pilgrim's Rules of Etiquette). 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. Modarressi died in 1997 at the age of 65, from lymphoma. Tyler and Modarressi had two daughters, Tezh and Mitra. Both share their mother's interest in, and talent for, painting. Tezh is a professional photographer, and an artist who works primarily in oils, who painted the cover of her mother's novel, Ladder of Years. Mitra is a professional illustrator working primarily in watercolors. She has illustrated seven books, including two children's books co-authored with Tyler (Tumble Tower and Timothy Tugbottom Says No!). 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. For some time she was noteworthy among contemporary best-selling novelists, for she rarely granted face-to-face interviews nor did book tours nor made other public appearances. In 2012 she broke with this policy and gave her first face-to-face interview in almost 40 years; subsequently, Mark Lawson interviewed her on BBC Radio in 2013 about her approach to writing. 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.
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."
