Biography+of+Anne+Tyler

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler was born on on October 25, 1941 in Minneapolis, MN. She is the daughter of chemist, Lloyd Parry and Phyllis Tyler. While moving very frequently during her childhood, her family would mostly live within Quaker communities throughout the Midwest and Southern United States until finally settling in North Carolina. During this time, Tyler enrolled at Duke University at the age of sixteen, focusing her studies on Russian, later continuing her studies at Columbia University. Tyler returned to Duke in 1962 to work as a Russian bibliographer at the university library.

Anne Tyler married Taghi Modarressi in 1963, then relocating to Montreal in 1964 where she began work as an assistant librarian at McGill University Law School. It was at this point Tyler wrote her first two novels “If Morning Never Comes” and “The Tin Can Tree.” In 1967, Tyler and her husband moved to Baltimore, MD where she worked on the majority of her following novels. It was at this point in her writing career, Tyler began receiving positive critical acclaim for her novels “A Slipping-Down Life” and “The Clock Winder.” Anne Tyler was ultimately awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Breathing Lessons” in 1988.

In 1997, after 34 years of marriage, Anne Tyler's husband died of lymphoma. Tyler herself is a breast cancer surviver, revealing in an interview with USA Today that she is currently in great health.