Anne Tyler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. The eldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father was a chemist and her mother a social worker. Her early childhood was spent in a succession of Quaker communities in the mountains of North Carolina and in Raleigh. She didn't attend a school until she was 11 and this unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise". She graduated at 19 from Duke University, and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University in New York City. She... worked as a librarian and bibliographer before moving to Maryland. She is noteworthy among contemporary best-selling novelists, for she rarely grants face-to-face interviews or does book tours, nor does she make many other public appearances, although she has made herself available through email interviews. Tyler's ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which she considers her best work, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983.
more