Tyler, Anne, 1941–, American novelist, b. Minneapolis. Often set in the American South and frequently in and around Baltimore, Md., her fiction, which is marked by wit and perception, portrays vivid characters involved in ordinary human life, particularly family relationships. Among her novels are A Slipping-Down Life (1970), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988; Pulitzer Prize), Saint Maybe (1991), Ladder of Years (1995), The Amateur Marriage (2004), and Digging to America (2006).

Tyler, Anne

(born Oct. 25, 1941, Minneapolis, Minn., U.S.) U.S. writer. Tyler worked as a bibliographer and librarian before settling in Baltimore in 1967 and beginning to write full-time. Her novels, comedies of manner marked by compassionate wit and precise details of domestic life, include Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985; film, 1988), Breathing Lessons (1988, Pulitzer Prize), and A Patchwork Planet (1998). Several focus on eccentric middle-class people living in chaotic, disunited families in Baltimore.

Tyler, Anne (m. Modarressi) (1941– ) writer; born in Minneapolis, Minn. She studied at Duke (B.A. 1961) and Columbia (1961–62) Universities. She worked as a Russian bibliographer at Duke (1962–63), and as a library assistant at McGill University, Montreal (1964–65). Reynolds Price encouraged her to write when she attended Duke, but it was only when she settled in Baltimore (1967) with her psychiatrist husband and children that she began to produce her highly acclaimed short stories and novels. She is best known for such novels as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), and The Accidental Tourist (1985).