Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant | Author Biography

Anne Tyler was born on October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to chemist Lloyd Parry Tyler and social worker Phyllis Mahon Tyler. The daughter of Quakers, hers was a somewhat nomadic childhood, living in such places as Chicago; Duluth, Minnesota; and Cleo, North Carolina (in which her family lived in an experimental collective community in the mountains). When Anne was eleven, her family settled in Raleigh, North Carolina. Adapting to this relatively cosmopolitan environment did not come easily, since up until that time, the young girl was unfamiliar with such conveniences as the telephone. Tyler ultimately adjusted, sometimes doing field work on tobacco plantations and observing the quirks and dialects of her coworkers. In high school, she planned to become a book illustrator. Phyllis Peacock, one of her English teachers, also instructed Reynolds Price, who became a successful novelist and a friend of Tyler's.

Attending Duke University on full scholarship, Tyler took a writing course taught by Reynolds Price and majored in Russian. In 1961, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. and briefly pursued graduate work at Columbia University. From 1962 to 1963, Tyler worked as a Russian bibliographer at Duke University; in May, 1963, she married the Iranian medical student and novelist Taghi Mohammed Modaressi. While her husband completed his residency at McGill University in Montreal, Tyler took a job as the assistant to the librarian of McGill's Law Library.

Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler

In Montreal, Tyler wrote her first two novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965), neither of which received much critical attention. However, the critics who took notice praised the author's maturity and anticipated her future success. By the time Tyler had published her fifth novel, Celestial Navigation (1974), critics such as Gail Godwin and John Updike agreed she was a literary force to be reckoned with. With the publication of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), her place as one of the best and most significant American novelists of her generation seemed secure. In addition to several novels, more than fifty of Anne Tyler's short stories have been published to date.

Along the way, Tyler has received countless literary awards, including the Mademoiselle award for writing (1966); Award for Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, (1977); Janet Heidinger Kafka prize (1981), PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1983), and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1989). With the latter award and the 1990 motion picture The Accidental Tourist—based on Tyler's novel of the same name—some of the writer's popularity has spread into the American mainstream.

While not an easy author to categorize, Tyler has often been described as a Southern writer, setting her early novels in the South, and is frequently compared to William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. In spite of her great productivity, she remains something of an enigma: an extremely private person who grants few interviews and shuns most public appearances.