Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) is a
Pulitzer Prize-winning American
novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1983),
The Accidental Tourist (1985), and
Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with
Breathing Lessons winning the prize for 1989. She has also won the
Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the
Ambassador Book Award, and the
National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded
The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her “brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail,” and her “rigorous and artful style” and “astute and open language.” While many of her characters have been described as quirky or eccentric, she has managed to make them seem real through skillfully fleshing out their inner lives in great depth. Her subject in all her novels has been the American family and marriage: the boredom and exasperating irritants endured by partners, children, siblings, parents; the desire for freedom pulling against the tethers of attachments and conflicted love; the evolution over time of familial love and sense of duty. Tyler celebrates unremarkable Americans and the ordinary details of their everyday lives. Because of her style and subject matter, she has been compared to
John Updike, to
Jane Austen, and to
Eudora Welty, among others.