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Children

• Tumble Tower (1993) with Mitra Modarressi, illustrator
  A very messy princess in a very tidy royal family has the opportunity to prove that there are advantages to not being neat. Baby-Preschool

• Timothy Tugbottom Says No! (2005) with Mitra Modarressi, illustrator
  Timothy Tugbottom knows what he likes—and he definitely does not like different. Blueberry muffins for breakfast? A new book at bedtime? A brand-new big-boy bed? No thank you, not for him. He’s perfectly happy with his favorite cereal and his alphabet book—not to mention the warm, safe crib he’s been sleeping in his whole life. Although he has to admit his crib isn’t quite as comfortable as it used to be. . . .  Baby-Preschool

Collections

• Anne Tyler (1994)
  Four complete novels:  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Morgan's Passing, The Tin Can Tree, If Morning Ever Comes.

• Best of the South (1996), Shannon Ravenel, ed.

• Anne Tyler (2001)
  Three complete novels:  A Patchwork Planet, Ladder of Years, Saint Maybe

• Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade (2005), Shannon Ravenel, ed.

Novels

• If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
  Ben Joe Hawkes is a worrier. Raised by his mother, grandmother, and a flock of busy sisters, he's always felt the outsider. When he learns that one of his sisters has left her husband, he heads for home and back into the confusion of childhood memories and unforeseen love....

• The Tin Can Tree (1965)
  In the small town of Larksville, the Pike family is hopelessly out of step with the daily rhythms of life after the tragic, accidental death of six-year-old Janie Rose. Mrs. Pike seldom speaks, blaming herself, while Mr. Pike is forced to come out of his long, comfortable silence. Then there is ten-year-old Simon, who is suddenly without a baby sister -- and without understanding why she's gone.
  
  Those closest to this shattered family must learn to comfort them -- and confront their own private shadows of hidden grief. If time cannot draw them out of the dark, then love may be their only hope....

• A Slipping-Down Life (1970)
  Evie Decker is a shy, slightly plump teenager, lonely and silent. But her quiet life is shattered when she hears the voice of Drumstrings Casey on the radio and becomes instantly attracted to him. She manages to meet him, bursting out of her lonely shell--and into the attentive gaze of the intangible man who becomes all too real....
  Movie (1999), Toni Kalem, director with Marshall Bell and Tom Bower    DVD  VHS

• The Clock Winder (1972)
  Mrs. Pamela Evans lives a lonely new widowhood outside of Baltimore, with only a house full of ticking clocks for company. Then she hires eccentric Elizabeth Abbott as a handyman and both discover that parts don't have to be a perfect match to work.

• Celestial Navigation (1974)
  Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jaremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn--especially when he's falling in love....

• Searching for Caleb (1975)
  Duncan Peck has a fascination for randomness and is always taking his family on the move. His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912, with nothing more than a fiddle in his hand. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots...to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one....

• Earthly Possessions (1977)
  Charlotte Emory has always lived a quiet, conventional life in Clarion, Maryland. She lives as simply as possible, and one day decides to simplify everything and leave her husband. Her last trip to the bank throws Charlotte's life into an entirely different direction when a restless young man in a nylon jacket takes her hostage during the robbery--and soon the two are heading south into an unknown future, and a most unexpected fate....
  Movie (1999), James Lapine, director with Stephen Dorff and Susan Sarandon  DVD  VHS

• Morgan's Passing (1980)
  Morgan Gower works at Cullen's hardware store in north Baltimore. He has seven daughters and a warmhearted wife, but as he journeys into the gray area of middle age, he finds his household growing tedious. Then Morgan meets two lovely young newlyweds under some rather extreme circumstances--and all three discover that no one's heart is safe....

• Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
  Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together--with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell....

• The Accidental Tourist (1985) -- Winner 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
  The story of a travel-hating writer of travel books, Macon Leafy, who systematically avoids adventure... until he meets the frizzy-haired, stiletto-heeled, astonishing Muriel (she's trying to train his unmanageable Welsh corgi, Edward), who up-ends Macon's world and thrusts him into engagement with life. Anne Tyler's most famous best seller.
  Movie (1988), Lawrence Kasdan, director with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt   DVD  VHS

• Breathing Lessons (1988) -- Winner 1988 Pulitzer Price
  Maggie and Ira Moran have been married for twenty-eight years–and it shows: in their quarrels, in their routines, in their ability to tolerate with affection each other’s eccentricities. Maggie, a kooky, lovable meddler and an irrepressible optimist, wants nothing more than to fix her son’s broken marriage. Ira is infuriatingly practical, a man “who should have married Ann Landers.” And what begins as a day trip to a funeral becomes an adventure in the unexpected. As Maggie and Ira navigate the riotous twists and turns, they intersect with an assorted cast of eccentrics–and rediscover the magic of the road called life and the joy of having somebody next to you to share the ride . . . bumps and all.
  Movie (1994), John Erman, director with James Garner and Joanne Woodward DVD  VHS

• Saint Maybe (1991)
  In 1965, the happy Bedloe family is living an ideal, apple-pie existence in Baltimore.  Then, in the blink of an eye, a single tragic event occurs that will transform their lives forever--particularly that of seventeen-year-old Ian Bedloe, the youngest son, who blames himself for the sudden "accidental" death of his older brother.
  
  Depressed and depleted, Ian is almost crushed under the weight of an unbearable, secret guilt.  Then one crisp January evening, he catches sight of a window with glowing yellow neon, the CHURCH OF THE SECOND CHANCE.  He enters and soon discovers that forgiveness must be earned, through a bit of sacrifice and a lot of love...
  Movie (1998), Michael Pressman, director with Mary-Louise Parker and Thomas McCarthy  VHS

• Ladder of Years (1995)
  BALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION, declares the headline. Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace or reason. But for Delia, who feels like a tiny gnat buzzing around her family's edges, "walking away from it all" is not a premeditated act but an impulse that will lead her into a new, exciting, and unimagined life. . . .

• A Patchwork Planet (1998)
  Barnaby Gaitlin has been in trouble ever since adolescence. He had this habit of breaking into other people's houses. It wasn't the big loot he was after, like his teenage cohorts. It was just that he liked to read other people's mail, pore over their family photo albums, and appropriate a few of their precious mementos.
  
  But for eleven years now, he's been working steadily for Rent-a-Back, renting his back to old folks and shut-ins who can't move their own porch furniture or bring the Christmas tree down from the attic. At last, his life seems to be on an even keel.
  
  Still, the Gaitlins (of "old" Baltimore) cannot forget the price they paid for buying off Barnaby's former victims. And his ex-wife would just as soon he didn't show up ever to visit their little girl, Opal. Even the nice, steady woman (his guardian angel?) who seems to have designs on him doesn't fully trust him, it develops, when the chips are down, and it looks as though his world may fall apart again.

• Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
  "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person." So Anne Tyler opens this irresistible new novel.
  
  The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother. Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else’s?
  
  On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation—something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family’s crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.
  
  Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it—how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been—is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel.
  Movie (2004) with Blyth Danner Faye Dunaway, Jack Palance, Peter Fonda, and Peter Riegert  DVD VHS

• The Amateur Marriage (2003)
  They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.
  
  Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.
  
  From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.

• Digging to America (2006)
  In what is perhaps her richest and most deeply searching novel, Anne Tyler gives us a story about what it is to be an American, and about Maryam Yazdan, who after thirty-five years in this country must finally come to terms with her “outsiderness.”
  
  Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport—the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam’s fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian American wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate with an “arrival party,” an event that is repeated every year as the two families become more deeply intertwined.
  
  Even independent-minded Maryam is drawn in. But only up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by one of the Donaldson clan, a good-hearted man of her vintage, recently widowed and still recovering from his wife’s death, suddenly all the values she cherishes—her traditions, her privacy, her otherness—are threatened. Somehow this big American takes up so much space that the orderly boundaries of her life feel invaded.
  
  A luminous novel brimming with subtle, funny, and tender observations that cast a penetrating light on the American way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here and those who are still struggling to fit in.

See also:

• The Best American Short Stories 1983 (1983) with Shannon Ravenel, ed.

• Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike (1988) by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

• Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler (1989) by Joseph C. Voelker

• Anne Tyler as Novelist (1994) by Dale Salwak

• Anne Tyler: A Critical Companion (1998) by Paul Bail
  Anne Tyler's novels strike a deep chord of responsiveness in her readers because her novels bring to life contemporary characters to whom we can instantly relate and in whose experiences we can see mirrored our own. Tyler's novels deal with the human experience: relationships between marital partners, between parents and children...between siblings; the meaning of love; the nature of identity; impermanence and change; and loss and continuity. In Anne Tyler novels, life is a complexity whose texture is built out of multiple layers. In this insightful study, Paul Bail shows us how Tyler constructs the complex reality of life through character, narrative point of view, theme, and literary devices. With the exception of Tyler's earliest two novels, which she prefers to forget, a chapter is devoted to each of the other novels she has written. Among the twelve are her unforgettable novels of family relationships and love...loss and renewal, such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and Breathing Lessons. Also included is an analysis of Tyler's most recent novel, A Patchwork Planet. Following a biographical chapter that relates Tyler's life to her work, Bail discusses the novels within the literary tradition of Southern regional literature, women's literature, and popular culture. He also explores the influence of religion on her writing. Each novel is discussed in an individual chapter that includes sections on plot, characters, themes, literary devices, historical setting, and point of view. Bail also offers an alternate critical approach from which to read the novel, such as feminist or multicultural criticism. This study is ideal for students and readers of Anne Tyler and will enrich the reading and appreciation of her novels.