Introduction



Until the cows came home…Anne Tyler was in charge! Tyler’s parents valued a rural lifestyle and settled in the hills of North Carolina in a somewhat communal settlement. The principal of the local school often had to go home in the afternoons to feed his cows, and he would leave Tyler in charge of the school during his absence. Often humorous and always smart, her stories were influenced by these early Southern memories and by Eudora Welty’s writing despite the fact that many of Tyler’s own books are set in Baltimore, Maryland, where she now resides. She is most famous for writing The Accidental Tourist, which was made into a film in 1988, and Breathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989.  

Essential Facts

  1. Tyler graduated from Duke University at the age of 19. Later, she was a bibliographer at Duke and worked in the law library at McGill University.
  2. Tyler did graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University before becoming a full-time author.
  3. Tyler loves the rewriting process and often rewrites her novels in longhand.
  4. Tyler’s newest novel, Digging to America, was inspired by her witnessing a family adopting a new baby at the airport. It’s also taken from her experience with her late-husband’s Iranian family.
  5. Critics have been hard on Tyler because of her tendency to mix comedy and drama, but she is, at this point, considered one of America’s most influential authors.