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Anne Tyler papers

 Collection
Identifier: D.365

Biographical / Historical note

American novelist and short story writer Anne Tyler was born the eldest of four children to Lloyd Parry Tyler, an industrial chemist, and Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker, on October 25, 1941. Although born in Minnesota, she spent her early childhood in various Quaker communities throughout the mountains of North Carolina. When she was 11, the Tyler family settled in Raleigh, NC, and Tyler attended her first large, public school system. At age 19, in 1961, she graduated from Duke University, where she studied with writer Reynolds Price. She did post-graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Tyler subsequently worked as a Russian bibliographer for Duke University Library and in the law library of McGill University before moving to Baltimore, Maryland in 1967. She married Iranian psychiatrist and novelist Taghi Modarressi (1931-1997) in 1963 at age 21, with whom she has two daughters, Tezh and Mitra. To date, Tyler has written more than twenty novels, including: If Morning Ever Comes (1964), The Tin Can Tree (1965), A Slipping-Down Life (1970), The Clock Winder (1972), Celestial Navigation (1974), Searching for Caleb (1976), Earthly Possessions (1977), Morgan's Passing (1980), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1989), Saint Maybe (1991), Ladder of Years (1995), A Patchwork Planet (1998), Back When We Were Grownups (2001), The Amateur Marriage (2003), and Digging to America (2006). She has published one story for children, Tumble Tower (1993), illustrated by her daughter Mitra Modarressi, and has penned many short stories, which have been printed in such publications as The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, Harper's, and The Archive. Tyler has also edited three anthologies, all in partnership with Susan Ravenel: The Best American Short Stories 1983 (1983), Best of the South: From Ten Years of New Stories from the South (1996), and Best of the South: From the Second Decade of New Stories from the South (2005). Tyler has received numerous awards for her work. While at Duke, she twice received the Anne Flexner Award for Creative Writing. In 1977, she won an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for "literary excellence and promise of important work to come." For Morgan's Passing (1980), she received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman through the University of Rochester's Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English. In 1986, Tyler was awarded the National Book Critics Award for The Accidental Tourist. In 1989, her novel Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Tyler was the only woman featured on Time magazine's 1990 list of the ten best novels of the decade for her The Accidental Tourist. Additionally, six of Tyler's novels have been adapted for film: The Accidental Tourist (1988), A Slipping-Down Life (1999), Breathing Lessons (1994), Saint Maybe (1998), Earthly Possessions (1999), and Back When We Were Grownups (2004). The latter four were adapted for television only.

Subject

Title
Anne Tyler papers
Author
Finding aid prepared by Rare Books and Special Collections staff
Date
undated
Description rules
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language of description
English
Script of description
Latin

Library Details

Part of the Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation Library

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Rochester NY 14627-0055 USA