Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 and raised partly in a Quaker commune in North Carolina. She graduated from Duke University in 1961 and did graduate study in Slavic Studies at Columbia University. She lives in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore.
She writes character-focused novels about families and marriages, many set in Baltimore. Her books include Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988), Saint Maybe (1991) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015).