SOURCE: "Anne Tyler," in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, The University of Alabama Press, 1990, pp. 251-78.

In the followingessay, Gilbert presents an overview of Tyler's work and major themes.

Anne Tyler, with ten novels, the last the winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, has a secure critical reputation and a large and faithful audience. Her fictional world is well defined. It is a personal world. The concerns of her characters are the persistent and primary psychological anxieties of life. Children hunger for their mothers' approval. They feel grief and guilt at the death or disappearance of a parent. Siblings' rivalries and dependencies, loves and angers, last for lifetimes. Sons and daughters spend decades running away from, or back to, their homes.

On these private lives, the great world impinges little. Except to her artist characters, envied in their absorptions, neither work nor politics, social status...