Desert Island Discs

Anne Tyler is a novelist and short story writer. Her 23 novels include the Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Breathing Lessons. Anne was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1941, the oldest of four children. Her parents were Quakers and the family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina in 1948. When she was 11 the family moved to Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, where Anne attended a mainstream school.Anne majored in Russian literature at Duke University in North Carolina where she enrolled in a creative writing class run by the author Reynolds Price. After completing her studies she worked as a librarian in the university library.Anne’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964 when she was just 22-years-old. Her writing is widely praised for the way it chronicles the lives of middle-class America and celebrates endurance and the com