Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler has made a noteworthy career of telling the often less-than-glamorous stories of small-town people enduring life’s everyday ups and downs. The novelist, short story writer, and literary critic describes herself as “a housewife who writes,” and her fully developed characters appear in comedies of manners that are noted for their compassionate wit and their precise details of domestic life. The perception of changes over time is a common theme in most of her work.
Tyler has published twenty-four novels, including her best-known “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” “The Accidental Tourist,” and “Breathing Lessons.” All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and “Breathing Lessons” won the prize in 1989.
Tyler was born in 1941 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Quaker parents. She spent her early years in a succession of Quaker communities in the South with limited access to books and technology until being enrolled in public school in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her unorthodox upbringing made her feel like an outsider, a feeling she would carry most of her life, and she adopted writing as a coping mechanism. Despite a previous lack of formal education, Tyler flourished as a student and graduated at 16.
Tyler attended Duke University on a full scholarship and graduated just three years later. She attended graduate school at Columbia University, thriving in New York City, before returning to Duke as a bibliographer. She also worked as a librarian at McGill University in Montreal before settling in Baltimore, Maryland, where she turned to writing full-time.
Tyler published several books, including “If Morning Ever Comes,” “The Tin Can Tree,” “A Slipping-Down Life,” and “The Clock Winder,” before coming to nationwide attention with “Celestial Navigation” and “Searching for Caleb.” Later books include “Saint Maybe,” “Ladder of Years,” “A Patchwork Planet,” “Digging to America,” “The Beginner’s Goodbye,” and “A Spool of Blue Thread.” The latter novel 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.
Tyler has also been the recipient of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, which is presented annually for the "best book-length work of prose fiction" by an American woman, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her 24th novel, “French Braid,” follows a family over six decades and was published in 2022.