Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four 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 has been 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. 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, was 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 other subjects in a tiny schoolhouse. 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 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 childhood book 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, profoundly influenced 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 or used a telephone. This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise."

Tyler felt like an outsider in the public schools she attended in Raleigh, a feeling that has followed her most of her life. She believes 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 lacking public schooling before 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."