Anne Tyler

American writer Anne Tyler is known for such award-winning novels as 'The Accidental Tourist' and 'Breathing Lessons.' Her novels and short stories, set mainly in Baltimore, focus on family life and issues of time and change. Anne Tyler's first two books, 'If Morning Ever Comes' (1964) and 'The Tin Can Tree' (1965), set the tone for her ability to render emotionally complex characters with impressive detail. Subsequent efforts, including 'Celestial Navigation' (1974) and 'Searching for Caleb' (1975), also drew strong reviews. By the time of her ninth book, 'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' (1982), Tyler was a bona fide literary star. Her widely praised follow-up novel, 'The Accidental Tourist' (1985), was made into a 1988 feature film, starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. That year she also published Breathing Lessons, a portrait of a sputtering middle-aged couple on their way to a funeral, which earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Tyler continued her steady output the following decade with novels such as 'The Ladder of Years' (1995), and saw both new titles, like 'Saint Maybe' (1991), and older ones, like 'Earthly Possessions' (1977), adapted for the screen. Later books included 'Back When We Were Grownups' (2001), 'Digging to America' (2006) 'The Beginner's Goodbye' (2012) and 'A Spool of Blue Thread' (2015). Tyler has also penned several short stories, edited three anthologies and created two children's books (illustrated by one of her daughters). In 2016, as part of the Hogarth Press Shakespeare project, she delivered a clever retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, with the characters of Kate and Petruchio respectively transformed into a preschool teacher and a Russian lab scientist.