Anne Tyler Books

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Anne Tyler is a Pulitzer award-winning American literary critic, short story writer, and novelist that hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Tyler has been writing for most of her adult life, having been very active in writing short stories during her college years. It was during her time in college at Duke that she started to take writing seriously, publishing her short stories in several publications such as her college’s Archive, Harpers, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker.

Order of Anne Tyler Standalone Novels

# Read Title Published Details
1 If Morning Ever Comes 1964 Description / Buy
2 The Tin Can Tree 1965 Description / Buy
3 A Slipping-Down Life 1969 Description / Buy
4 The Clock Winder 1972 Description / Buy
5 Celestial Navigation 1974 Description / Buy
6 Searching for Caleb 1975 Description / Buy
7 Earthly Possessions 1977 Description / Buy
8 Morgan's Passing 1980 Description / Buy
9 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant 1982 Description / Buy
10 The Accidental Tourist 1985 Description / Buy
11 Breathing Lessons 1988 Description / Buy
12 Saint Maybe 1991 Description / Buy
13 Ladder of Years 1995 Description / Buy
14 A Patchwork Planet 1998 Description / Buy
15 Back When We Were Grownups 2001 Description / Buy
16 The Amateur Marriage 2004 Description / Buy
17 Digging to America 2006 Description / Buy
18 Noah's Compass 2009 Description / Buy
19 The Beginner's Goodbye 2012 Description / Buy
20 A Spool of Blue Thread 2015 Description / Buy
21 Clock Dance 2018 Description / Buy
22 Redhead by the Side of the Road 2020 Description / Buy
23 French Braid 2022 Description / Buy

Order of Anne Tyler Picture Books

# Read Title Published Details
1 Tumble Tower (Short Story) 1993 Description / Buy
2 Timothy Tugbottom Says No! (Short Story) 2005 Description / Buy

Order of Anne Tyler Short Stories/Novellas

# Read Title Published Details
1 Teenage Wasteland 2020 Description / Buy

Order of Hogarth Shakespeare Series

# Read Title Published Details
1 The Gap of Time ( By: Jeanette Winterson) 2015 Description / Buy
2 Shylock is My Name ( By: Howard Jacobson) 2016 Description / Buy
3 Vinegar Girl 2016 Description / Buy
4 Hag-Seed ( By: Margaret Atwood) 2016 Description / Buy
5 New Boy ( By: Tracy Chevalier) 2017 Description / Buy
6 Dunbar ( By: Edward St. Aubyn) 2017 Description / Buy
7 Macbeth ( By: Jo Nesbø) 2018 Description / Buy

Order of Best American Short Stories Series

# Read Title Published Details
1 The Best Short Stories of 1915 1916 Description / Buy
2 The Best Short Stories of 1916 1916 Description / Buy
3 The Best Short Stories of 1917 1917 Description / Buy
4 The Best Short Stories of 1918 1918 Description / Buy
5 The Best Short Stories of 1919 1919 Description / Buy
6 The Best Short Stories of 1921 1921 Description / Buy
7 The Best Short Stories of 1922 1922 Description / Buy
8 The Best Short Stories of 1923 1923 Description / Buy
9 The Best Short Stories 1924 1924 Description / Buy
10 The Best Short Stories of 1925 1925 Description / Buy
11 The Best Short Stories 1926 1926 Description / Buy
12 The Best Short Stories 1927 1927 Description / Buy
13 The Best Short Stories of 1928 1928 Description / Buy
14 The Best Short Stories of 1929 1929 Description / Buy
15 The Best Short Stories 1930 1930 Description / Buy
16 The Best Short Stories 1931 1931 Description / Buy
17 The Best Short Stories of 1932 1932 Description / Buy
18 The Best Short Stories 1933 1933 Description / Buy
19 The Best Short Stories 1934 1934 Description / Buy
20 The Best Short Stories 1935 1935 Description / Buy
21 The Best Short Stories 1936 1936 Description / Buy
22 The Best Short Stories 1937 1937 Description / Buy
23 The Best Short Stories of 1938 1938 Description / Buy
24 50 Best American Short Stories, 1915-1939 1939 Description / Buy
25 The Best Short Stories 1939 1939 Description / Buy
26 The Best Short Stories of 1940 1940 Description / Buy
27 The Best Short Stories 1941 1941 Description / Buy
28 The Best American Short Stories 1942 1942 Description / Buy
29 The Best American Short Stories 1943 1943 Description / Buy
30 The Best American Short Stories 1944 1944 Description / Buy
31 The Best American Short Stories 1945 1945 Description / Buy
32 The Best American Short Stories 1946 1946 Description / Buy
33 The Best American Short Stories 1948 1948 Description / Buy
34 The Best American Short Stories 1949 1949 Description / Buy
35 The Best American Short Stories 1950 1950 Description / Buy
36 The Best American Short Stories 1951 1951 Description / Buy
37 The Best American Short Stories 1952 1952 Description / Buy
38 The Best American Short Stories 1953 1953 Description / Buy
39 The Best American Short Stories 1955 1955 Description / Buy
40 The Best American Short Stories 1956 1956 Description / Buy
41 The Best American Short Stories 1957 1957 Description / Buy
42 The Best American Short Stories 1958 1958 Description / Buy
43 The Best American Short Stories 1959 1959 Description / Buy
44 The Best American Short Stories 1960 1960 Description / Buy
45 The Best American Short Stories 1961 1961 Description / Buy
46 The Best American Short Stories 1962 1962 Description / Buy
47 The Best American Short Stories 1963 1963 Description / Buy
48 The Best American Short Stories 1965 1965 Description / Buy
49 The Best American Short Stories 1966 1966 Description / Buy
50 The Best American Short Stories 1967 1967 Description / Buy
51 The Best American Short Stories 1968 1967 Description / Buy
52 The Best American Short Stories of 1969 1969 Description / Buy
53 The Best American Short Stories 1970 1970 Description / Buy
54 The Best American Short Stories 1971 1971 Description / Buy
55 The Best American Short Stories 1972 1972 Description / Buy
56 The Best American Short Stories 1973 1973 Description / Buy
57 The Best American Short Stories 1974 1974 Description / Buy
58 The Best of Best American Short Stories 1915-1950 1975 Description / Buy
59 The Best American Short Stories 1975 1975 Description / Buy
60 The Best American Short Stories 1976 1976 Description / Buy
61 The Best American Short Stories 1977 1977 Description / Buy
62 The Best American Short Stories 1978 1978 Description / Buy
63 The Best American Short Stories 1979 1979 Description / Buy
64 The Best American Short Stories 1980 1980 Description / Buy
65 The Best American Short Stories 1981 1981 Description / Buy
66 The Best American Short Stories 1983 1983 Description / Buy
67 The Best American Short Stories 1984 1984 Description / Buy
68 The Best American Short Stories 1985 1985 Description / Buy
69 The Best American Short Stories 1987 1987 Description / Buy
70 The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties 1990 Description / Buy
71 The Best American Short Stories 1990 1990 Description / Buy
72 The Best American Short Stories 1991 1991 Description / Buy
73 The Best American Short Stories 1992 1992 Description / Buy
74 The Best American Short Stories 1995 1995 Description / Buy
75 The Best American Short Stories 1996 1996 Description / Buy
76 The Best American Short Stories 1997 1997 Description / Buy
77 The Best American Short Stories 1998 1998 Description / Buy
78 The Best American Short Stories 1999 1999 Description / Buy
79 The Best American Short Stories 2000 2000 Description / Buy
80 The Best American Short Stories 2001 2001 Description / Buy
81 The Best American Short Stories 2002 2002 Description / Buy
82 The Best American Short Stories 2003 2003 Description / Buy
83 The Best American Short Stories 2004 2004 Description / Buy
84 The Best American Short Stories 2005 2005 Description / Buy
85 The Best Short Stories of 1921, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story 2007 Description / Buy
86 The Best American Short Stories 1921 2007 Description / Buy
87 The Best American Short Stories 2009 2009 Description / Buy
88 The Best American Short Stories 2015 2015 Description / Buy
89 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories 2015 Description / Buy
90 The Best American Short Stories 2017 2017 Description / Buy
91 The Best American Short Stories 2018 2018 Description / Buy
92 The Best American Short Stories 2019 2019 Description / Buy
93 The Best American Short Stories 2020 2020 Description / Buy

Order of Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith Series

# Read Title Published Details
1 Listening for God Reader, Vol. 1 ( By: Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Walker, Garrison Keillor, Annie Dillard) 1994 Description / Buy
2 Listening for God, Vol. 2 ( With: John Updike, , Gail Godwin) 1996 Description / Buy
3 Listening for God, Vol. 3 ( By: Tillie Olsen, Wendell Berry, John Cheever, Louise Erdrich, Mary Gordon, , , Oscar Hijuelos) 2000 Description / Buy
4 Listening For God, Vol. 4 ( By: Robert Olen Butler, Allegra Goodman, , Kent Haruf, , Doris Betts) 2002 Description / Buy

Anne Tyler Anthologies

# Read Title Published Details
1 Stories of the Modern South 1977 Description / Buy
2 The Writer on Her Work 1980 Description / Buy
3 A World of Fiction 1983 Description / Buy
4 Listening for God, Vol. 2 1996 Description / Buy
Print: Print PDF

The author Anne Tyler was born in October 1941 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the eldest of four children, born into a Quaker family. As her parents were Quakers, they moved around for the first seven year’s of Anne’s life, eventually ending up in Celo, North Carolina. She lived there until 1952, while she was being home-schooled, as well being educated from a correspondence course. During her formative years, Tyler cites Little Women as being a big influence, having read it 22 times during her childhood years. At the age of 11, her family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she started to gain a formal education in school. Tyler, upon completion of high school, attended Duke University, where she studied creative writing.

It was during her time at Duke that Anne Tyler had her first piece of fiction published; her short story Laura published in Archive, the literary journal of Duke, which also won her a creative writing award. Her next short story, The Saints In Caesar’s Household also won her an award, and it led to her being courted by literary agents.

It was 1964 that Anne Tyler’s first book was published, If Morning Ever Comes, which she started writing while working in the library at Duke. She followed If Morning Ever Comes with The Tin Can Tree in 1965, and she then took five years off before the publication of A Slipping-Down Life, during which time she started a family with her husband.

From 1970 onwards, Anne Tyler went back to writing full-time, and in 1988 Breathing Lessons was released, which gained her a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989.

Some of her books have been adapted for film and television, with The Accidental Tourist, starring Genna Davis, William Hurt and Kathleen Turner being released in 1988, for which Geena Davis won Best Supporting Actress at the 1988 Academy Award.

As well as her adult fiction, Anne Tyler has also released pictures book for children including Tumble Tower, and Timothy Tugbottom Says No!, which both feature illustrations by her daughter, Mitra Modarressi.

Anne Tyler wrote her first ever-novel “If Morning Ever Comes” in 1964 while still a student at Duke College. “The Tin Can Tree” followed in 1965, before she took a hiatus until 1970. It was in the 1970s that the author started garnering more attention and recognition for her work. Starting from the 70s to the present, she has published over twenty critically acclaimed novels that have proved incredibly popular.

ANN TYLER AWARDS

Ann Tyler has won many awards throughout her career and been nominated for many more. Her novel “Morgan’s Passing” was on the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Awards, and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction. “Dinner at Homesick Restaurant” brought her closer to the ultimate recognition as it made the shortlist for the 1983 American Book Award for Fiction, the Faulkner/PEN Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Accidental Tourist won the 1986 Ambassador Book Award for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made the shortlist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize. It was in 1989 that she received the ultimate accolade when “Breathing Lessons” her eleventh novel won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as being voted Time Magazine’s Book of the Year.

ANN TYLER BOOKS INTO TV/MOVIES

In 1988, “The Accidental Tourist” the tenth novel by Tyler was adapted into a film starring Geena Davis and William Hurt. Her Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Breathing Lessons” was also made into a TV movie in 1994. Her 2001 novel “When We Were Grownups” and the 1991 novel “Saint Maybe” were also adapted into movies in 2004 and 1998 respectively. The adaptation of the novels into film served to enhance the visibility of Tyler’s work over the years.

BEST ANN TYLER BOOKS

With over twenty novels over her long career, Tyler is one of the top contemporary young adult novelists of this generation. Three of her most highly regarded novels are:

Breathing Lessons: The incredible Pulitzer Prize winning novel is one of Ann Tyler’s master classes. It is a moving, surprising, and entertaining tale of the pains and joys of the marriage of an ordinary American couple, Maggie and Ira Moran. Maggie is easy-going and impetuous, while Ira is patient, competent, and seemingly infallible. They have been together for nearly three decades. On a drive back home after attending the funeral of a close friend, Anne Tyler tells their story of the disappointments, and expectations in a marriage, and how children apart from being a blessing can create strife in the family or enhance the love between a couple.

The Accidental Tourist: The 1985 published novel is an entertaining take on the adventures of Macon Leary a travel writer that surprisingly hates new experiences and travel. His reluctance to travel or experience anything out of the ordinary is due to an unwillingness to give up his comfortable life, and a preference for the lonely life at home. Everything changes forever when he meets a stunning dog obedience trainer, who introduces herself as Muriel. Muriel thrusts herself into his insular life and gently nudges him into an amazing engagement with life that he never thought he would ever enjoy.

Saint Maybe: One of Ann Tyler’s best works that has been made into a movie. Set in 1965, it features the Bedloe family that lives the ultimate life of luxury in Baltimore, Maryland. But a tragic event changes their lives for good, particularly that of the youngest son Bedloe. The seventeen year old believes himself culpable in the accidental death of his sibling. Crushed and depressed for months, he walks under a cloud of secret and unbearable guilt, until he discovers something that turns his life around. Walking the streets of his hometown on a crisp winters evening he sees a glowing neon sign written CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE. Entering the church, he soon finds out that he can find forgiveness and that his burden can be lifted, if he is willing to love and sacrifice without expecting anything back.

Anne Tyler FAQs

Q: What is the first book published by Anne Tyler?

A: The title of Anne Tyler’s first book If Morning Ever Comes, which was released in 1964.

Q: What book did Anne Tyler win a Pulitzer Prize for?

A: Anne Tyler won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her book Breathing Lessons, which was released in 1988.

When Does The Next Anne Tyler book come out?

Anne Tyler doesn't seem to have an upcoming book. Their newest book is French Braid and was released on March, 22nd 2022.

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1 thought on “Anne Tyler”

  1. Anne Tyler has a rare talent. She is able to write about nothing which then, through her wonderful wordsmith ways becomes something. The treadmill of daily life becomes a peek into secret thoughts and machinations of great import. You fall deeply into caring about her characters; scolding them, applauding them, despairing of them, loving them, hating them, but always embracing them.

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