Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) 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'' 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.

Early life and education

Early childhood

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.Bail, Paul (1998), ''Anne Tyler: A Critical Companion'', Westport, Connecticut:Greenwood Press. 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.Willrich, Patricia R. (Summer, 1992)
Watching through Windows: A Perspective on Anne Tyler
" ''The Virginia Quarterly Review,'' Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia.Croft, Robert W. (1995), ''Anne Tyler: A bio-bibliography.'' Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

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."Allardice, Lisa (January 4, 2004), "Accidental celeb", ''The Observer'', UK

Raleigh, North Carolina

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 believes 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 o 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."

Duke and Columbia Universities

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.Tyler, Anne (1980), "Still Just Writing," reprinted in Sternberg, Janet (2000), ''The Writer on her Work, vol. 1'', New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 3–16. 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''.Evans, Elizabeth (1993), ''Anne Tyler'' New York: Twayne. She majored in Russian Literature at Duke—not English—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" o 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 a year later (1963).

Career

Early writing and first publications

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 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.

A hiatus from writing: having babies, raising children—1965 to 1970

In 1965 (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 like 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."

Growing recognition as a novelist—1970 to 1980

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

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