"The real heroes to me in my books," Anne Tyler told Marguerite Michaels, "are first the ones who manage to endure and second the ones who somehow are able to grant other people the privacy of the space around them and yet still produce some warmth." Tyler herself has managed to endure -- producing twelve novels in thirty years -- while demanding space around her (she steadfastly refuses teaching appointments, lectures, readings, and most interviews). Her frequently warm, often shy characters have endured in the minds of her readers as well, creating an enthusiastic following for this private Baltimore writer.

The daughter of chemist Lloyd Parry Tyler and social worker Phyllis Mahon Tyler, Anne Tyler was born on 25 October 1941 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From there the family moved to Pennsylvania, Chicago, Duluth, Celo (a collective, experimental community in the North Carolina mountains), and finally to Raleigh, North Carolina. She...