Anne Tyler

Tyler was born in Minneapolis and raised partly in a Quaker commune in rural North Carolina before studying at Duke University under Reynolds Price, then settling permanently in Baltimore, the setting of nearly all twenty-plus of her novels.

Breathing Lessons (1988) follows a middle-aged couple, Maggie and Ira Moran, on a single day's round-trip drive to a friend's funeral, its digressions and old arguments unfolding the whole shape of a long, imperfect marriage; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year.

Notoriously private and steadily prolific, Tyler has continued publishing character-driven domestic novels (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist among the best-loved) into her eighties, chronicling ordinary Baltimore family life with a consistency few American novelists have matched.