Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. The oldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tyler has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others.Įarly life and education Early childhood She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her 'brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail', her 'rigorous and artful style', and her 'astute and open language.'

Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (1985)Īnne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic.

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