[1] Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020.
She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail",[2] her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language.
[5][6] The Celo Community settlement was populated largely by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends.
[4][5][6][8] Her first memory of her own creative story-telling was of crawling under the bed covers at age three and "telling myself stories in order to get to sleep at night.
[5] During her years at Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, she was inspired and encouraged by a remarkable English teacher, Phyllis Peacock.
[4][14] At Duke, Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price's first creative writing class, which also included a future poet, Fred Chappell.
There she became somewhat addicted to riding trains and subways: "While I rode I often felt like I was ... an enormous eye taking things in, turning them over and sorting them out ... writing was the only way" [to express her observations].
About this time, the couple moved to Baltimore, MD as Taghi had finished his residency and obtained a position at the University of Maryland Medical School.
In her own opinion, her writing improved considerably during this period; with her children entering school, she was able to devote a great deal more focus to it than had been possible since she graduated from Duke.
[5] John Updike gave a favorable review to her next novel, Searching for Caleb, writing: "Funny and lyric and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design ...
In his review in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, "Her art needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully shaped sketches solidity ...
[19][20] Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Tyler has written 13 more novels; many have been Book of the Month Club Main Selections and have become New York Times Bestsellers.
[21][22] In her 2006 novel Digging to America, she explored how an immigrant from Iran, who has lived in the U. S. for 35 years, deals with her "outsiderness," perspectives with which Tyler is familiar due to her marriage to Iranian psychiatrist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi.
[4][23] After a year and a half internship in Wichita, Kansas, he obtained a residency in child psychiatry at Duke University Medical School.
Tezh is a professional photographer, and an artist who works primarily in oils,[25] who painted the cover of her mother's novel, Ladder of Years.
[6] For some time she was noteworthy among contemporary best-selling novelists, for she rarely granted face-to-face interviews nor did book tours nor made other public appearances.
They are modern in their fictional techniques, yet utterly unconcerned with contemporary moment as a subject, so that, with only minor dislocations, her stories could just as well have taken place in twenties or thirties.
Their often humble or eccentric occupations, carefully observed and threaded with humor, are tightly sewn to the other parts of their lives, offering them the mixed benefit of tedium and consolation, as well as a lighted stage for the unfolding of their dramatic selves.
"[37] While Tyler herself does not like to think of her novels in terms of themes, numerous reviewers and scholars have noted the importance of family and marriage relationships to her characters and stories.
Liesl Schillinger summarized: "Taken together, the distinct but overlapping worlds of her novels have formed a Sensurround literary record of the 20th century American family—or, at least, of the proud but troubled archetypal families that ... interested her most.
Reviewing Saint Maybe, Jay Parini describes how Tyler's characters must deal with "Ms. Tyler's oddball families, which any self-respecting therapist would call 'dysfunctional' ... An inexplicable centripetal force hurls these relatives upon one another, catches them in a dizzying inward spiral of obligation, affection and old-fashioned guilt—as well as an inexpressible longing for some perfect or "normal" family in a distant past that never really was.
"[42] McMurtry puts it this way, "The fates of [Tyler's] families hinge on long struggles between semiattentive males and semiobsessed females.
"[31] Kakutani described Saint Maybe in a similar manner: "Moving back and forth among the points of view of various characters, Ms. Tyler traces two decades in the lives of the Bedloes, showing us the large and small events that shape family members' lives and the almost imperceptible ways in which feelings of familial love and obligation mutate over the years.
"[33] Again in her review of Breathing Lessons, Kakutani perceives that "she is able, with her usual grace and magnanimity, to chronicle the ever-shifting covenants made by parents and children, husbands and wives, and in doing so, to depict both the losses – and redemptions – wrought by the passage of time.
"[32] Tyler herself further weighs in upon how small events can impact relationships: "I love to think about chance -- about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe ...
"[6] John Blades, literary critic for the Chicago Tribune, skewered The Accidental Tourist (as well as all her earlier novels) as "artificially sweet" and "unrealistic.
"[44] The Observer's Adam Mars-Jones stated, in his review of The Amateur Marriage: "Tyler seems to be offering milk and cookies.
Since she moved to the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, she has used a small, orderly corner room in her house, where the only distractions are the sounds of "children playing outside and birds.
[6] In 2013, Tyler gave the following advice to beginning writers: "They should run out and buy the works of Erving Goffman, the sociologist who studied the meaning of gesture in personal interactions.
[48] for Morgan's Passing (1980): for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982): for The Accidental Tourist (1985): for Breathing Lessons (1988): for Ladder of Years (1995): for Digging to America (2006): for A Spool of Blue Thread (2015): for Redhead By the Side of the Road (2020): for Lifetime achievement: