34 Facts About Anne Tyler

1.

Anne Tyler was born on October 25,1941 and is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic.

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2.

Anne Tyler has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and Breathing Lessons.

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3.

Anne Tyler has won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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4.

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

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5.

Anne Tyler's father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker.

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6.

Anne Tyler's 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.

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7.

Anne Tyler lived there from age seven through eleven and helped her parents and others care for livestock and organic farming.

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8.

Anne Tyler describes reading Little Women twenty-two times as a child.

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9.

Anne 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.

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10.

At Duke, Anne Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price's first creative writing class, which included a future poet, Fred Chappell.

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11.

Anne Tyler 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.

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12.

Anne Tyler majored in Russian Literature at Duke—not English—and graduated in 1961, at age nineteen, having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

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13.

Anne Tyler left Columbia graduate school after a year, having completed course work but not her master's thesis.

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14.

Anne Tyler returned to Duke, where she got a job in the library as a Russian bibliographer.

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15.

Russell, who was an agent for both Reynolds Price and for Anne Tyler's "crowning influence" Eudora Welty, later became Anne Tyler's agent.

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16.

Anne Tyler settled comfortably in the city of Baltimore where she has remained and where she has set most of her subsequent novels.

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17.

Anne Tyler began writing again in 1970 and had published three more novels by 1974—A Slipping-Down Life, The Clock Winder, and Celestial Navigation.

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18.

Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler has written 13 more novels; many have been Book of the Month Club Main Selections and have become New York Times Bestsellers.

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19.

In 1963, Anne Tyler married Iranian psychiatrist and novelist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi.

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20.

Anne Tyler later wrote three more novels, two of which Tyler helped to translate to English.

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21.

Anne Tyler has illustrated seven books, including two children's books co-authored with Tyler.

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22.

Anne Tyler's novels have been reviewed and analyzed by numerous fellow authors, scholars and professional critics.

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23.

Also Anne Tyler herself has revealed much about her own writing through interviews.

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24.

Anne Tyler allows her men and women an opportunity for redemption.

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25.

Just as Anne Tyler is difficult to categorize as a novelist, it is challenging to label her style.

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26.

Anne Tyler has frequently noted Tyler's themes with regard to family and marriage.

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27.

Almost every novel by Anne Tyler begins with a loss or absence that reactivates in the family some primordial sense of itself.

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28.

Anne Tyler is very disciplined and consistent about her work schedule and environment.

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29.

Anne Tyler starts work in the early morning and generally works until 2 pm.

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30.

Anne Tyler begins her writing by reviewing her previous days' work and then by sitting and staring off into space for a time.

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31.

Anne Tyler describes this phase of writing as an "extension of daydreaming, " and it focuses on her characters.

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32.

Anne Tyler says the act of putting words to paper for her is a "very mechanical process, " involving a number of steps: writing first in long hand on unlined paper, revising long hand versions, typing the entire manuscript, re-writing in long hand, reading into a tape-recorder while listening for "false notes, " playing back into a stenographer's machine using the pause button to enter changes.

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33.

Anne Tyler can be quite organized, going so far as to map out floor plans of houses and to outline the chronology of all the characters in a given novel.

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34.

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

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