Tyler, Anne

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Anne Tyler

Personal

Born October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis, MN; daughter of Lloyd Parry (a chemist) and Phyllis (a social worker; maiden name, Mahon) Tyler; married Taghi Mohammed Modarressi (a psychiatrist and writer), May 3, 1963 (died, 1997); children: Tezh, Mitra (daughters). Education: Duke University, B.A., 1961; graduate study at Columbia University, 1961-62. Religion: Society of Friends (Quaker).

Addresses

Home—222 Tunbridge Rd., Baltimore, MD 21212.

Agent—Russell & Volkening, 50 West 29th St., New York, NY 10001.

Career

Writer. Duke University Library, Durham, NC, Russian bibliographer, 1962-63; McGill University Law Library, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, assistant to the librarian, 1964-65.

Member

PEN, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Authors Guild, Authors League of America, Phi Beta Kappa.

Awards, Honors

Mademoiselle award for writing, 1966; Award for Literature, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1977; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination in fiction, 1980, Janet Heidinger Kafka prize, 1981, and American Book Award nomination in paperback fiction, 1982, all for Morgan's Passing; National Book Critics Circle Award nomination in fiction, 1982, and American Book Award nomination in fiction, PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and Pulitzer Prize nomination in fiction, all 1983, all for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and Pulitzer Prize nomination for fiction, both 1985, both for The Accidental Tourist; Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and National Book Award nomination for fiction, both 1989, both for Breathing Lessons.

Writings

If Morning Ever Comes, Knopf (New York, NY), 1964.

The Tin Can Tree, Knopf (New York, NY), 1965.

A Slipping-down Life, Knopf (New York, NY), 1970.

The Clock Winder, Knopf (New York, NY), 1972.

Celestial Navigation, Knopf (New York, NY), 1974.

Searching for Caleb, Knopf (New York, NY), 1976.

Earthly Possessions, Knopf (New York, NY), 1977.

Morgan's Passing, Knopf (New York, NY), 1980.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982.

(Editor with Shannon Ravenel, and author of introduction) Best American Short Stories 1983, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1983.

The Accidental Tourist, Knopf (New York, NY), 1985, reprinted, ImPress (Pleasantville, NY, 1999.

Breathing Lessons (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1988.

Anne Tyler: Four Complete Novels (omnibus volume; contains Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Morgan's Passing, The Tin Can Tree, and If Morning Ever Comes), Avenel Books (New York, NY), 1990.

Anne Tyler: A New Collection (omnibus volume; contains The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons, and Searching for Caleb), Wings Books (New York, NY), 1991.

Saint Maybe, Knopf (New York, NY), 1991.

Tumble Tower (children's book), illustrated by daughter Mitra Modarressi, Orchard Books (New York, NY), 1993.

(With Robert W. Lenski) Breathing Lessons (screenplay based on her novel), Republic Pictures, 1994.

Ladder of Years, Knopf (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor with Shannon Ravenel) Best of the South:From Ten Years of New Stories from the South, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1996.

A Patchwork Planet, Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.

Back When We Were Grownups, Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

A Patchwork Planet; Ladder of Years; Saint Maybe: ThreeComplete Novels, Bright Sky Press (Albany, TX), 2001.

The Amateur Marriage, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Saturday Evening Post, New Yorker, Seventeen, Critic, Harper's, Reporter, McCalls, Mademoiselle, Antioch Review, and Southern Review.

Adaptations

The Accidental Tourist was released as a film by Warner Brothers in 1988, starring William Hurt and Geena Davis; Earthly Possessions was adapted as a television film by Home Box Office in 1999, starring Susan Sarandon and Stephen Dorff; A Slipping-down Life was adapted for film in 2004. The Clock Winder, Morgan's Passing, Breathing Lessons, and Saint Maybe were adapted as audiobooks.

Sidelights

"I think of my work as a whole. And really what it seems to me I'm doing is populating a town," American novelist Anne Tyler told Marguerite Michaels in a rare interview for the New York Times Book Review. Praised as one of the most adept chroniclers of contemporary family life, the reclusive, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tyler was praised by New Yorker contributor John Updike, who noted that in such highly acclaimed novels as The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons, and A Patchwork Planet, "Tyler's details pull from our minds recognition of our lives." Discussing the author's thirteenth novel, Ladder of Years, in Commonweal, Gene H. Bell-Villada praised Tyler as "our foremost poet of family life. Her eye and ear for the intimate textures of day-to-day parenthood, aunthood, mother-in-lawhood, and every conceivable kinship tie remain as sharp and reliable as ever."

Tyler's protagonists are the sort of people one might meet in everyday life; there are no villains to add a jarring note to her carefully orchestrated middleclass scenarios. The characters in her novels and short stories grapple with mundane matters: the stuff of childhood, marriage, parenthood, career, and religion. Caren J. Town noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Tyler's popularity rests in part on the apparent ordinariness of her subjects: the power of family, the struggle for personal growth, the accumulation of possessions, and the influence of religion. Yet this ordinariness is not simplicity: she treats each common situation with wry humor and fills each plot with eccentric characters and unconventional developments."

Tyler's body of work has garnered increased respect and recognition from critics over the years. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Breathing Lessons, and The Accidental Tourist have all received a number of literary awards, and The Accidental Tourist was adapted into a critically acclaimed film. As New York Times Book Review contributor Edward Hoagland observed, Tyler is "blessedly prolific and graced with an effortless-seeming talent at describing whole rafts of intricately individualized people." Despite her ever-increasing popularity, though, Tyler has resolutely retained her privacy; she has repeatedly turned down offers to teach, give lectures, or appear on television, and has consented to interviews only occasionally. As the writer indicated in a rare talk with Sarah English for the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, "my main reason for doing little in public is that it's not what I'm good at—but yes, it also protects my working time. As I get older, I've learned to say 'no' more and more—and I get happier and happier."

Settling in the South

Tyler was born on October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, a chemist, and her mother, a social worker, relocated the family several times during Tyler 's childhood. Tyler 's parents were Quakers, a religious faith known for its pacifism. The family, which also included three younger boys, lived in various Quaker communes throughout the Midwest and South before settling in North Carolina for most of her teenage years. Tyler was an avid reader—her favorite book was Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House—and was writing her own stories by age seven. "There was nothing very unusual about my family life," Tyler recalled in her interview with English, "but I did spend much of my older childhood and adolescence as a semi-outsider—a Northerner, commune-reared, looking wistfully at large Southern families around me." She grew accustomed to life in the South, however, and the region serves as the setting for nearly all of her fiction.

At the age of sixteen Tyler began attending classes at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. While at Duke she was encouraged to develop her writing ability by Reynolds Price, a novelist who had attended the same high school as Tyler, and her first published story, "Laura," appeared in Duke's literary magazine. After receiving a B.A. from Duke in 1961—and twice winning the school's Anne Flexner creative writing award—Tyler attended Columbia University, where she served as the school's Russian bibliographer. A year later she married Taghi Mohammed Modarressi, an Iranian-born child psychiatrist and novelist.

Tyler's writing career began modestly. She turned out a wave of short stories, but few of them were published. Her first novel-length effort likewise met with rejection at every publishing house she tried. She persevered, however, and her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. As time has passed she has come to disown this early work, noting that it was written during the first six months of her marriage, a period during which she was unemployed. Still, this tale of a young man's struggle to determine his obligations to his family after the death of his father received complimentary reviews from a number of critics. New York Times Book Review contributor Rollene W. Saal called the novel a "subtle and surprisingly mature story about the lack of communication between human beings, of a man's essential isolation from the world—and especially and more poignantly from his own family." Even reviewers who were critical of the novel's character development and plot movement qualified their judgments by noting that it was a promising effort from the twenty-two-year-old author. Similar criticisms were leveled at Tyler's second novel, The Tin Can Tree, another work she has since dismissed.

By the time her third novel, A Slipping-down Life, was published in 1970, Tyler's family had grown to include two infant girls. The book tells the story of a lonely, overweight girl named Evie and her efforts to establish an identity for herself. The action in the novel is triggered by Evie's decision to carve the name of a rock singer onto her forehead with scissors. In a Dictionary of Literary Biography essay, Mary Ellen Brooks commented that A Slipping-down Life "is an accurate depiction of loneliness, failure to communicate, and regrets over decisions that are irreversible—problems with which any age group can identify."

Balancing Work and Family

Not surprisingly, the addition of two infants to the Tyler family's Baltimore household had an impact on Tyler's writing efforts, which were gaining increased attention with each new novel. Speaking of her daughters, Tyler admitted in her interview with English that "their infancy did interrupt my work for a few years, or made me shift my working time to evening, which is the same as interrupting it since I can't think past 3 p.m. Generally, I cope[d] with interruptions like school vacations, mono, etc., by giving in gracefully. . . [and made] no attempt to work under such conditions."

Reviews of Tyler's fourth novel, The Clock Winder, were generally favorable, and she followed this success with Celestial Navigation in 1974. Celestial Navigation studies the life of Jeremy, an artist with an overwhelming fear of open spaces. This fear has relegated him to his studio, and the death of his mother in the novel's opening pages serves to further widen the gulf between Jeremy and the outside world. As the story unfolds he manages to establish a relationship with a boarder named Mary, who, unlike Jeremy, is cheerful and outgoing. They eventually marry, but Mary's skill at shielding Jeremy from his fears only makes him withdraw further into his shell. "In the end," Brooks remarked, "each returns to his separate life, each still dominated by his innate driving characteristic. Jeremy returns to his life as a reclusive artist in a crumbling dark house while Mary prepares for winter in a rundown shack, knowing that another man will eventually provide for her and her children when her resources run out." Critics cited The Clock Winder as Tyler's finest to date, pointing to the book's superior plot and character development and skillful use of multiple viewpoints. In her New York Times Book Review assessment, contributor Gail Godwin commented that Tyler's characters are "'oddballs,' visionaries, lonely souls, but she has a way of transcribing their peculiarities with such loving wholeness that when we examine them we keep finding more and more pieces of ourselves."

By the mid-1970s a critical consensus found Tyler's style unique in many ways. New York Times Book Review contributor Katha Pollitt explained that it is often difficult to classify Tyler's novels: "They are Southern in their sure sense of family and place but lack the taste for violence and the Gothic that often characterizes self-consciously Southern literature. . . . The current school of feminist-influenced novels seems to have passed her by completely: her women are strong, often stronger than the men in their lives, but solidly grounded in traditional roles." Reviewers such as Pollitt also noted that while Tyler's novels are usually placed in contemporary settings, she rarely comments on contemporary issues or their impact on her characters. As a result, the time frame is often of no consequence to the primary action in the story. Tyler's established talent for portraying characters that are readily recognizable by readers was also touted as a primary reason for her critical success and popularity. In her novels, as in real life, "characters are both burdened with and supported by their families; for Tyler, families are something one simultaneously wants to escape and to create," wrote Town.

Attracts Attention of Awards Juries

In 1977's Earthly Possessions, which was adapted as a 1999 television film starring Susan Sarandon, Tyler tells the story of a woman who is kidnapped during a bungled bank robbery and forced to accompany the robber on his flight from Maryland to Florida. During the journey the woman looks back on her life and takes stock. Morgan's Passing, published three years later, finds Tyler's focus on a family man who assumes a variety of different identities, ranging from street priest to French immigrant. While Morgan's Passing was greeted with a mixed although generally favorable response from reviewers, the novel was honored with both a National Book Critics Circle fiction award nomination and an American Book Award paperback fiction nomination.

Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was also nominated for several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it received the 1983 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is one of Tyler's grimmer accounts of family relationships. Three now-grown children visit their mother, an embittered and selfish woman who now rests on her deathbed. As the novel unfolds, the memories and feelings of all four regarding their family are laid bare and, as Town remarked, "a novel that in other hands could have become a horrific chronicle of the violent legacy neglectful and cruel parents hand down to their children becomes instead a meditation on the ways people can produce sustaining families instead of reproducing destructive ones." Benjamin DeMott, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant goes "deeper than many living novelists of serious reputation have penetrated, deeper than Miss Tyler herself has gone before. It is a border crossing."

Acclaim for The Accidental Tourist

On the heels of the successful Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Tyler produced yet another novel that received an enthusiastic critical reception. The Accidental Tourist, published in 1985, examines the life of Macon Leary, a travel writer who puts together guidebooks for reluctant travelers who must make trips away from home for business or personal reasons. Macon is a cautious, methodical man who separated from his wife after the couple's twelve-year-old son was murdered and now lives with his sister and two brothers. They also view interaction with the outside world with reluctance. Only after becoming involved with Muriel, an animated, vivacious animal trainer, does Macon begin to emerge from his "accidental tourist cocoon," as Tracy Chevalier wrote in Contemporary Novelists.

Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Richard Eder praised Tyler's development of sympathetic characters in The Accidental Tourist, commenting that Macon is a very odd man, "yet we grow so close to him that there is not the slightest warp in the lucid, touching and very funny story of an inhibited man moving out into life." Chicago Tribune Book World contributor John Blades cast a dissenting opinion, questioning whether the book's author, "with her sedative resolutions to life's most grievous and perplexing problems, can be taken seriously as a writer." Most reviewers, though, registered enthusiastic approval for the book, and it was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1985. In 1988 a film version of The Accidental Tourist was released; it featured the talents of William Hurt, Geena Davis, and Kathleen Turner.

Tyler's Breathing Lessons was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1989. Its main characters are Ira and Maggie Moran, a middle-aged couple who continue to love each other despite their very different personalities. The novel begins as the Morans embark on a trip to the funeral of a high school friend, then "moves effortlessly between the present trip to the funeral, the past of Maggie's courtship and marriage to Ira, the recent past of the breakup of her son's marriage, and the future of his former wife and Maggie's grandchild as Maggie tries to combine them all into some meaningful whole," according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Town.

Wallace Stegner, writing in the Washington Post Book World, remarked that "Maggie Moran, who dominates the new novel, is a purely Anne Tyler creation. . . . Even while we wonder how her husband Ira has put up with Maggie for twenty-eight years, we understand why the marriage has lasted, and will. Maggie's deviousness, underlain by emotional purposes as inexorable as heat-seeking missiles, is a form of innocence." Several reviewers remarked on Tyler's skill in making her ordinary characters both familiar and interesting, with humor but not condescension. Chicago's Tribune Books contributor Hilma Wolitzer commented that BreathingLessons serves as "Tyler's gentlest and most charming novel and a paean to what is fast becoming a phenomenon—lasting marriage. . . . This is an honest and lovely book."

Continues to Mine Average Lives

In Tyler's twelfth novel, Saint Maybe, she is concerned with the subject of religion. "All I knew at the start was that I wondered what it must feel like to be a born-again Christian, since that is a kind of life very different from mine," she told Patricia Rowe Willrich in an Virginia Quarterly interview. The story centers on the Bedlows, a middle-class American family leading a prosperous existence. Seventeen-year-old Ian Bedlow's life is turned upside-down, however, after his older brother Danny arrives at the house with his opportunistic fiancée Lucy and Lucy's children from an earlier marriage. As time passes, Ian comes to suspect that the couple's newborn child, Daphne, may not be his brother's progeny. His decision to reveal his suspicions ultimately triggers the deaths of Danny and Lucy, and haunts Ian for many years after. Ian is similar to many of Tyler's other characters, according to Town, for they "hope, early or later in life, to escape from the burdens and responsibilities of their families, but they find they are not trapped, and they learn that they do not really want to escape."

In Ladder of Years Tyler introduces readers to Delia Grinstead, a woman on the cusp of middle age who views herself as a "sad, tired, anxious forty-year-old woman who hadn't had a champagne brunch in decades." Delia impulsively leaves her self-absorbed family and sets out to create a new life for herself in a strange community. Delia enjoys some triumphs but, as Times Literary Supplement contributor Joyce Carol Oates observed, "though the reader is solidly on Delia's side, hoping that so sweet-natured, decent and un-appreciated a woman can establish a new, it soon becomes clear that Delia isn't up to it. She lacks the inner resources, professional training and spirit to make the transition." While Oates called Ladder of Years a "poignant work," she added that it paints "a bleak vision somewhat at odds with the affable tone of Anne Tyler's prose and the insistent curve of her narrative towards marital accord." Booklist critic Donna Seaman, however, called the work a "charming, often hilarious, and astute novel. Tyler is in top form here. Her seemingly effortless prose is, like silk, rich in subtle hues and sheeny with dancing light."

In A Patchwork Planet Barnaby Gaitlin is pushing thirty, divorced, on the outs with his blue-blood parents, and a halfhearted and mostly absent father to his daughter, Opal. Living in rented rooms, Barnaby has found an outlet for his voyeuristic tendencies by taking a job for a handyman service. While his elderly and infirm clients enjoy his company, Barnaby fears his violent tendencies, and suspects that he may have Tourette's syndrome. Looking desperately for a means by which he can begin his "real life," he latches on to friendly bank teller Sophia Maynard, hoping that she will be just that. As New York Times Book Review contributor Carol Shields noted, with her reputation as a "warmly compassionate recorder of middle-class America," Tyler characteristically "extends toward the wayward Barnaby a corona of sympathy—understanding and condoning his hunger" for a different kind of life, and his frustration that he cannot break out of his own reality. Calling A Patchwork Life a "wonderful novel," Shields added that in this novel, as in all Tyler's work, the novelist "allows her men and women an opportunity for redemption."

Like Delia Grinstead in Ladder of Years, the protagonist of Back When We Were Grownups wants to make a drastic change in her life. At age fifty-three a widow, mother, grandmother, and businesswoman, Rebecca Davitch suddenly looks at her life and realizes that she has become the "wrong person"; once a proper, calm, self-directed young woman, she has grown into what a Publishers Weekly reviewer described as "family caretaker and cheerleader, a woman with 'a style of dress edging dangerously close to Bag Lady.'" In an effort to reconnect with her youthful potential, Rebecca rekindles an old flame in the form of professor Will Allenby, re-embraces old hobbies, and attempts to make a fresh start emotionally. In Book Beth Kephardt praised the novel's protagonist as "marvelously drawn and complex," and noted that with Back When We Were Grownups Tyler is "still not scrimping on wackiness and wit, on sentences of shocking originality, on wisdom. She is still layering on the quirkiness so that she can meticulously peel it back." Calling Tyler's style "graceful, and even felicitious," World Literature Today contributor Rita D. Jacobs praised Back When We Were Grownups as "a novel of rediscovery where a grown woman is caught unawares by the meaning in her own life."

A couple who wed impulsively during World War II and then lived in a conflicted relationship for thirty years thereafter is the focus of 2004's The Amateur Marriage. The relationship between Pauline Barclay and Michael Anton parallels that of Macon Leary and Muriel in The Accidental Tourist: Pauline is outgoing and life-affirming while the quiet but impulsive Michael opts for total self-control. Together they raise three children before divorcing in 1971, having recently suffered through the drug addiction of their hippie daughter Lindy and years of growing alienation from each other. "A lesser novelist would take moral sides" in such a story, noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, but "Tyler is much more concerned with the fine art of human survival in changing circumstances." Noting that "enjoying Tyler is like indulging in a guilty pleasure," Lisa Allardice added in a review of The Amateur Marriage that while the novel's conclusion "is shamelessly sentimental, even for Tyler, . . . the earlier revelations are shocking in their tragic banality," and that throughout the novel she "captures the messy contradictions of human affections" with a sympathetic, and even comic, nuance.

Dubbed "a quiet observer of the existential quagmire" by Time contributor Richard Lacayo, Tyler continues to live in Baltimore, where much of her fiction takes place. As a writer, she keeps to a strict schedule, working four days a week for up to eight hours a day, and takes Fridays and weekends off. Her novels are written in longhand, explained London Observer contributor Lisa Allardice, the reviewer adding that "ideas apparently come to her while vacuuming." As Allardice quoted the reclusive author, Tyler has "no secret hobbies or extra curricular activities at all—[I am] . . . too busy day-dreaming."

As Brooks observed, Tyler's "work has evolved from the simple storytelling of the early novels into the carefully crafted, eloquent novels of her later career." Town agreed, concluding that "after thirty years of writing novels Tyler continues to concentrate on the family—with insight, humor, and hope." Her novels, while focusing on adult characters, often provide insights into the way in which choices made in youth impact one's future; as a contributor to the St. James Guide to Young-Adult Writers noted, "Young-adult readers struggling with family problems may be able to relate to these characters and find, as Maggie found in Breathing Lessons, that life . . . is a series of narrowing options which one can only play with as much skill and judgment as possible."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Bail, Paul, Anne Tyler: A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1998.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Contemporary Popular Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Croft, Robert William, Anne Tyler: A Bio-bibliography, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1995.

Croft, Robert William, An Anne Tyler Companion, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1998.

If you enjoy the works of Anne Tyler

If you enjoy the works of Anne Tyler, you may also want to check out the following books:

Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter, 1972.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees, 1988.

Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted, 2003.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 6: AmericanNovelists since World War II, Second Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1982, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Evans, Elizabeth, Anne Tyler, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1993.

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth, Safe at Last in theMiddle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Thorndike, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1988.

Kissel, Susan S., Moving On: The Heroines of ShirleyAnn Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin, Bowling Green State University Popular Press (Bowling Green, OH), 1996.

Linton, Karin, The Temporal Horizon: A Study of theTheme of Time in Anne Tyler's Major Novels, Academiae Ubsaliensis, 1989.

Petry, Alice Hall, Understanding Anne Tyler, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1990.

Petry, Alice Hall, editor, Critical Essays on Anne Tyler, G. K. Hall (New York, NY), 1992.

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Salwak, Dale, editor, Anne Tyler as Novelist, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1994.

Stephens, C. Ralph, editor, The Fiction of Anne Tyler, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1990.

Voelker, Joseph C., Art and the Accidental in AnneTyler, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1989.

PERIODICALS

America, October 8, 2001, John C. Hawley, review of Back When We Were Grownups, p. 33.

Antioch Review, winter, 1999, Gerda Oldham, review of A Patchwork Planet, p. 112.

Atlantic, May, 2001, Katharine Whittemore, review of Back When We Were Grownups, pp. 112-117.

Belles Lettres, January, 1996, Joan Mooney, review of Ladder of Years, p. 12.

Book, May, 2001, Beth Kephart, review of Back WhenWe Were Grownups, p. 63.

Booklist, March 15, 1995, Donna Seaman, review of Ladder of Years, p. 1284; March 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of A Patchwork Planet, p. 1045.

Chicago Tribune Book World, July 20, 1986, John Blades, review of The Accidental Tourist.

Christian Century, July 4, 2001, L. Gregory Jones, "Living into Our Histories," p. 29.

Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 2001, Ron Charles, "Grandma Wonders If It's Ever Too Late," p. 21.

Commonweal, June 16, 1995, Gene H. Bell-Villada, review of Ladder of Years, pp. 21-22.

Economist, February 7, 2004, review of The AmateurMarriage, p. 80.

Entertainment Weekly, January 23, 2004, Tina Jordan, review of The Amateur Marriage, p. 104.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2001, review of Back WhenWe Were Grownups, p. 361.

Library Journal, April 15, 1998, Caroline M. Hallsworth, review of A Patchwork Planet, p. 117.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 15, 1985, Richard Eder, review of The Accidental Tourist, p. 3.

National Catholic Reporter, May 24, 1996, Pamela Schaeffer, "Anne Tyler: Family Novelist with a Twist," p. 25.

New Republic, September 1, 1989, Carol, Iannone, "Novel Events," p. 46.

New Statesman, January 19, 2004, Lisa Allardice, "Lost Innocence," p. 54.

New Yorker, March 29, 1976, John Updike, review of Searching for Caleb, pp. 110-112.

New York Times, May 18, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, "A Martha Stewart on the Inexorable Path to Her Lost Self."

New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1964, Rollene W. Saal, "Loveless Household," p. 52; April 28, 1974, Gail Godwin, review of Celestial Navigation, p. 34; January 18, 1976, Katha Pollitt, review of Searching for Caleb, p. 22; May 8, 1977, Marguerite Michaels, "Anne Tyler, Writer 8:05 to 3:30," pp. 42-43; March 14, 1982, Benjamin DeMott, "Funny, Wise, and True," pp. 1, 14; September 11, 1988, Edward Hoagland, "About Maggie, Who Tried Too Hard," pp. 43-44; April 19, 1998, Carol Shields, "Odd Jobs"; May 20, 2001, John Leonard, "The Accidental Matriarch."

Observer (London, England), January 4, 2004, Lisa Allardice, "Accidental Celeb."

People, May 11, 1998, Emily Listfield, review of APatchwork Planet, p. 48; January 19, 2004, Lee Aitken, review of The Amateur Marriage, p. 45.

Publishers Weekly, March 16, 1998, review of A Patchwork Planet, p. 51; April 9, 2001, review of Back When We Were Grownups, p. 51; December 22, 2003, review of The Amateur Marriage, p. 37.

Southern Literary Journal, fall, 1998, Joyce R. Durham, "Anne Tyler's Vision of Gender in Saint Maybe,"
p. 143.

Spectator, January 3, 2004, Anita Brookner, "A Disturbing Absence of Disturbance," p. 29.

Time, April 27, 1998, Paul Grey, review of A Patchwork Planet, p. 80; February 2, 2004, Richard Lacayo, review of The Amateur Marriage, p. 75.

Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 1995, Joyce Carol Oates, "Time to Say Goodbye," p. 22.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), August 28, 1988, Hilma Wolitzer, review of Breathing Lessons, pp. 1, 9.

Virginia Quarterly, summer, 1992, Patricia Rowe Willrich, "Watching through Windows: A Perspective on Anne Tyler," pp. 497-516.

Washington Post, May 20, 2001, Alice McDermott, review of Back When We Were Grownups, p. T03.

Washington Post Book World, September 4, 1988, Wallace Stegner, review of Breathing Lessons, p. 1.

Women's Review of Books, July, 2001, Ellen Cronan Rose, review of A Fork in the Road, p. 30.

World and I, August, 1998, Linda Simon, review of APatchwork Planet, p. 274.

World Literature Today, spring, 2002, Rita D. Jacobs, review of Back When We Were Grownups, p. 154.