Anne Tyler

Baltimore has been Anne Tyler's territory for sixty years, and she still writes about it in longhand each morning in a house in Roland Park. Born in Minneapolis in 1941 to Quaker parents whose activism kept the family moving, she spent four childhood years in a commune at Celo in the North Carolina mountains, entered Duke at sixteen, read Russian there and took Reynolds Price's writing class, graduated at nineteen and did further work in Slavic studies at Columbia. She settled in Maryland with her husband, the Iranian psychiatrist and novelist Taghi Modarressi, who died in 1997. The Pulitzer came in 1989, for Breathing Lessons. Searching for Caleb (1975), her sixth novel, sends the fortune teller Justine Peck and her grandfather Daniel across the country after the brother who vanished from the stiff-backed Peck family in 1912; John Updike's New Yorker review of it widened her readership considerably. Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020), about a solitary computer repairman whose tidy routine gives way, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and French Braid (2022), her twenty-fourth novel, threads the Garretts through six decades.