Anne Tyler has been steadily gaining well-deserved critical and popular attention for the eight novels and numerous short stories she has produced over the past seventeen years. Her work is as remarkable for its originality of plot as for its ingeniously conceived characters and polished prose. Tyler has not yet been the subject of close academic analysis, but there is widespread appreciation of her talent and recognition of her importance in contemporary literature.

Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 25 October 1941 to Lloyd Parry Tyler, a chemist, and Phyllis Mahon Tyler. She has spent most of her life in the South, particularly in North Carolina and Maryland, which also provide the settings for her novels. Until age eleven she was raised in a series of communes, an experience which she believes made her look "at the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise, which can...