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Breathing Lessons Author Biography

On October, 25, 1941, Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her parents were members of the Society of Friends and liberal activists, and the family lived in a series of Quaker communes across the Midwest and South of the United States. Anne read voraciously as a child and began write stories at the age of seven. When she was eleven, the family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she attended public school for the first time. The alienation she experienced at that time became a recurring theme in her writing.

Tyler attended Duke University on academic scholarship. During her time there, she studied creative writing and Russian. Although she wrote simply for '"something to do," she received the Anne Flexner award for creative writing twice. Her short stories were published throughout her college years. At nineteen, Tyler graduated from Duke after three years, with a B.A. in Russian.