Anne Tyler

At 82 years old, Anne Tyler physical status not available right now. We will update Anne Tyler's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

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.

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."

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. Joyce Carol Oates gave it good review in Mademoiselle: "Fascinating ... So unconventional a love story that it appears to take its protagonists themselves by surprise."

With her next novel, Tyler truly arrived as a recognized artist in the literary world. Tyler's ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which she considers her best work, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, PEN/Faulkner Award, and the American Book Award for Fiction in 1983. In his review in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, "Her art needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully shaped sketches solidity ... In her ninth novel, she has arrived at a new level of power." Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985, the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. It was also made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. The critical and commercial success of the film further increased the public awareness of her work. Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine's "Book of the Year". It was adapted into a 1994 TV movie, as eventually were four other of her novels.

Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Tyler has written 13 more novels; many have been Book of the Month Club Main Selections and have become New York Times Bestsellers. Ladder of Years was chosen by Time as one of the ten best books of 1995. A Patchwork Planet was a New York Times Notable Book (1999). Saint Maybe (1991) and Back When We Were Grownups (2001) were adapted into TV movies in 1998 and 2004, respectively. In her 2006 novel Digging to America, she explored how an immigrant from Iran, who has lived in the U. S. for 35 years, deals with her "outsiderness," perspectives with which Tyler is familiar due to her marriage to Iranian psychiatrist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi.

In addition to her novels, Tyler has published short stories in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, and Harper's, but they have never been published as a collection. Her stories include "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters" (1977), "Holding Things Together" (1977), and "Teenage Wasteland" (1983). Between 1983 and 1996, she edited three anthologies: The Best American Short Stories 1983, Best of the South, and Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade.

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