She completed her doctoral course work (but not the dissertation) in Russian at Columbia University and then worked as a Russian bibliographer at Duke.
In 1963 Tyler married Iranian-born child psychologist (and novelist) Taghi Mohammed Modaressi. She and her husband moved to Montreal, where he completed his residency. During this time she published her first novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965) and gave birth to her daughters -- Tezh in 1965 and Mitra in 1967. The family then moved to Baltimore, where Tyler has raised her daughters, managed her household, and written ten more novels, more than fifty short stories, and many book reviews. Her prolific output is in part the result of the strictness with which she has maintained the divisions between her work and her family and ruthlessly protected her free time.
Tyler is protective of her intellectual life as well, remaining, as Joseph C. Voelker says, "subtly evasive in all her nonfictional self-representations." She is as guarded of her characters as she is of her own privacy: "I think that what I most fear," she commented to Wendy Lamb, "is intrusion, but it doesn't happen with those characters because on paper you control them, you guard against that intrusion." She watches over her characters, not because she fears them -- or for them -- but, she says, because she likes them.
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