Anne Tyler (1941-) was born in the northern United States, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but was raised in the South, in various Quaker communities in North Carolina. She earned her B.A. degree at the age of 19 from Duke University and published her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, in 1964. Her fiction, which focuses on family relationships, tends to include quirky, often profoundly dysfunctional characters who seem disconnected from their immediate settings. Tyler’s ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant established her reputation as an American writer of note. The Accidental Tourist (1985) would be adapted into film and Breathing Lessons (1988) would win Tyler the Pulitzer Prize, but Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant remains one of her best-loved works. The novel follows the evolution of an American family as the twentieth century progresses.
The twentieth-century American family. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, both the makeup of the American family and the mythology connected to it changed drastically. Americans entered the century with a newborn discrepancy between the popular model of the family—based on domestic harmony and clear gender roles—and the degree of contentment with that model.
