American writer, highly acclaimed for novels that use witty colloquial dialogue to reveal the tensions and tragedies underlying everyday life in Baltimore and the small communities of the American South.
Tyler was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, and graduated from Duke University when she was only 19, having twice won the Anne Flexner Award offered there for creative writing. She has worked as a Russian bibliographer and as assistant to the librarian at McGill University Law Library.
Her literary debut came in 1964 with “If Morning Ever Comes.” Later titles include “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” 1982 and “The Accidental Tourist,” 1985, which was made into a film in 1988. For “Breathing Lessons,” 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her more recent novels include “Saint Maybe,” 1991), and “Ladder of Years ” (1995), a total of 15 books.
In 1963 she married a physician, Tughi Modarressi, with whom she has two daughters. Tyler has lived in Baltimore, Maryland, since 1967.
The eldest of four children whose father was a chemist and whose mother a social worker, she spent her early childhood in Quaker communities in the mountains of North Carolina. She wrote her first stories at age seven but didn’t attend a conventional school until age 11. Her husband, 10 years her senior, died in 1997.
Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine’s “Book of the Year”. It was adapted into a 1994 TV movie, as eventually were four other of her novels.
Link to Wikipedia biography