Anne Tyler Biography and List of Works

American novelist and short-story writer, whose keen ear for dialogue and life-like characters has won her critical acclaim. Several of Tyler's novels have been set in Baltimore and focus on middle-class families, their secrets, ambitions, dreams, and crises. Among Tyler's best-known books is The Accidental Tourist (1985), which was made into a successful film, and the Pulitzer Prize winner Breathing Lessons (1988).

"I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things - piano-playing, typing. You're given years of lessons in how to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and rising up a new human being."
(from Breathing Lessons, 1988)

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but grew up in North Carolina, the daughter of an industrial chemist and social worker. The family lived among various Quaker communities in the rural south before settling in Raleigh, North Carolina. These years formed the background for her Southern literary flavour, which is seen in the settings of her fiction. The writer Eudora Welty, who depicted the Mississippi of her childhood, influenced Tyler.

At the age of 19 Tyler graduated from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, where she twice won the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing. She became a member of Phi Beta Kappa and did post-graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Before settling in Baltimore, where she has lived for much of her adult life, Tyler was a bibliographer at Duke University, ordering books from the Soviet Union, and worked in the law library of McGill University. In 1963 Tyler married; she and her husband have two daughters.

As a writer Tyler made her debut in 1964 with If Morning Ever Comes, which depicts a young man, Ben Joe Hawkes, returning from Columbia to North Carolina and attempting to find his own way despite family expectations. He knows that his father lived alternately with his wife and his mistress and his grandmother married his grandfather although she was in love with another man. Finally Ben must decide how to continue with his ex-girlfriend.

In 1967 Tyler became a full-time writer. In 1977 she won an award from the American Academy for Earthly Possessions. Her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) explores tensions inside a family seen from the perspective of each member in turn. Pearl Cody Tull's children all have their own view of her - she is violently abusive, suspicious, or nurturing. Absentminded Ezra, the youngest son, runs the restaurant of the title, where Pearl's husband and her children gather for dinner after her funeral.

In 1986 The Accidental Tourist won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into a film in 1988, directed by Lawrence Kasdan and starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. It tells the story of a man, Macon Leary, who writes travel guides for travel-hating businessmen. After his son, Ethan is murdered in a fast-food joint and his wife Sarah leaves him, Macon spends his time travelling in aeroplanes, addicted to routine. "He approved planes. When the weather was calm, you couldn't even tell you were moving. You could pretend you were sitting safe at home. The view from the window was always the same - air and more air - and the interior of one plane was practically interchangeable with the interior of any other." Macon's routines are shattered when he meets Muriel Pritchett, a dog trainer and her young son. Macon moves in with Muriel, but Sarah wants him back. As in many of Tyler's novels, the characters are hesitant to flee their present lives. In this story Tyler also reassures that what ever happens, life goes on.

In 1989 Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons, the story of a couple who have been married for 28 years. Maggie Moran is the eternal optimist, daring and enterprising. She is married to Ira, who plays solitaire, and the mother of Jesse, a dropout from high school, and Daisy. On a hot summer day Maggie and Ira drive to the funeral of the husband of Maggie's best friend. During their 90-mile trip, Tyler explores the problems of marriage, love and happiness. "She [Tyler] loves love stories, though she often inventories the woe and entropy of loveless ness. She likes a wedding and all the ways weddings can differ, loves to enumerate the idiosyncrasies of children's sensibilities and of house furnishings. Temperate though she is, she celebrates intemperance, zest and an appetite for whatever, just as long as families stay together. She wants her characters plausibly married and caring for each other." (Edward Hoagland in The New York Times, September 11, 1988)

In Saint Maybe (1991) Tyler deals with the theme of guilt inside an unhappy middle-class family. After the death of his older brother Danny and his grief-stricken widow, Ian is tortured by self-accusations. He takes care of the orphaned children with his parents and becomes in the eyes of the youngest "King Careful. Mr. Look-Both-Ways. Saint Maybe." Ladder of the Year (1996) is a story about a woman who leaves her marriage and family to discover who she is. A Patchwork Planet (1998) tells the story of Barnaby Gaitlin, a former delinquent, incurable optimist, and divorcee. His daughter Opal, with her suspicious, piercing questions, is reminiscent of her mother. Barnaby helps old people through an organization called Rent-a-Back, but it is a mystery for him what makes some people more virtuous than others. "One of the high points of this narrative is a potluck Thanksgiving dinner at which no one has provided a turkey. There are two pumpkin chiffon pies, a marshmallow-yam casserole, and a cake made in Sophia's Crock-Pot, and the difficulty is this: 'If a meal is mainly dessert, it's hard to know when it's over.'" (Hilary Mantel in The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1998) In Back When We Were Grownups (2001) a mother of a large family, Rebecca Davitch, discovers that "she had turned into the wrong person." Rebecca is a grandmother, "wide and soft and dimpled, with two short wings of dry, fair hair flaring almost horizontally from a centre part." She doesn't believe that it is too late to make changes and tries to find her true self.

For further reading: The Temporal Horizon by K. Linton (1989); Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler's Major Novels by J. Voelker (1989); The Fiction of Anne Tyler, ed. by C.R. Stephens (1990); Understanding Anne Tyler by A.H. Petry (1990); Critical Essays on Anne Tyler, ed. by A.H. Petry (1992); Anne Tyler by E. Evans (1993); Anne Tyler as Novelist, ed. by D. Salwak (1994); Anne Tyler by Paul Bail (1998); An Anne Tyler Companion by Robert W. Croft (1998)

If Morning Ever Comes, (1964)