35 Facts About Anne Tyler

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Anne Tyler describes reading Little Women 22 times as a child.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

In 1965 at age 24, Anne Tyler had her first child, a daughter they named Tezh.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The role of the passage of time and its impact on Anne Tyler's characters is always present.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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