Well-known contemporary novelist and short story writer, Anne Tyler, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1941 to Lloyd, an industrial chemist, and Phyllis Tyler, a social worker. Soon after her birth, her family moved several times to various Quaker communities in the rural south, which would eventually show through in her somewhat Southern literary style. In 1948 the Tyler family moved into the Celo Community, an experimental shared labor community in the mountains of North Carolina. The children in the settlement received lessons in subjects such as art, carpentry, and cooking, but Anne Tyler also attended a local public school at Harvard. By the age of seven Tyler had already begun writing stories. After only three years of undergraduate work, and at the age of nineteen, Tyler graduated from Duke University with a degree in Russian. Tyler then went on the complete her graduate course work in Russian at Columbia, then returned to Duke to work as a Russian bibliographer.
In 1963, Tyler married Taghi Mohammed Modarressi, an Iranian-born child psychologist and novelist. Shortly after, Tyler moved to Montreal, where her husband was completing his residency while she published her first novels, If Morning Ever Comes and The Tin Can Tree. In 1965, the couples first daughter, Tezh, was born, followed by Mitra in 1967, prompting the family to move to Baltimore, the place in which Tyler still resides, although now widowed, and where many of her novels and short stories are set, especially Baltimore's Roland Park-the "epitome of upper-middle class waspdom in all its glory" (DISCovering Authors). Most of Tyler's time in Baltimore has been spent raising her two daughters, running her household, and publishing twelve more novels, a children's book, numerous short stories, and several reviews. Family life always took priority to Tyler's writing. When her daughters were school aged she was only able to work on her stories from 8 a.