She finished her undergraduate work (in three years) at Duke University, during which time she was the student of writer Reynolds Price, published short stories in the school literary magazine, twice won the Anne Flexner Creative Writing Award, and graduated with a degree in Russian. She completed her graduate course work (but not the dissertation) in Russian at Columbia University and then worked as a Russian bibliographer at Duke.
In 1963 she married Iranian-born child psychologist (and novelist) Taghi Mohammed Modarressi. She and her husband moved to Montreal, where he completed his residency while she published her first novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965), and gave birth to their daughters-Tezh in 1965 and Mitra in 1967. The family then moved to Baltimore, where she still resides (she was widowed in 1997). In Baltimore, Tyler raised her daughters, managed her household, and published twelve additional novels, a children's book, more than fifty short stories, and many reviews. Barbara Dixson, who has studied Tyler's reviews, comments on the "astonishing range" of her reading and notes that she "produces reviews at an amazing rate." Her prolific output is in part due to the strictness with which she has maintained the divisions between her work and her family (when her daughters were school-aged, she did all writing between 8:05 a.m.
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