The Creation Of Self

Anne Tyler is an American novelist who is famous for her humorous language and life-like characters. Since the publication of her first novel If Morning Ever Comes in 1964, she has published seventeen novels. In the meantime, she writes short stories as well as reviews. Until now, she has published more than fifty short stories, among which several have been collected in the Best American Short Stories annual series. Her eleventh novel Breathing Lessons won Pulitzer Prize in 1989 and placed her among the most important writers in American literary world. Her works enjoy a large readership and praise from the critics.Most of Tyler's novels focus on middle-class families, their secrets, ambitions, dreams, and crises. Tyler's major theme, according to Mary Ellen Brooks in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "is the obstinate endurance of the human spirit, reflected in every character's acceptance or rejection of his fate and in how that attitude affects his day-to-day life."~1 The world Tyler writes about is an ordinary world, and she rarely ventures far from those subjects. However, her exploration of family also contains that of the individual which embodies some universal theme like how people can cope with the chaotic world. She uses the family unit as a vehicle for portraying how people manage to endure together—how they "grate against each other, adjust, intrude and protect themselves from intrusions, give up, and start all over again in the morning."~2 Her domestic-psychological novels are primarily patterned exposures of some of the common pressure and conflicts that oppress post-modern American society. The problems and crisis in the middle-class family that she depicted with life-like language reflect the material and spiritual pressure that people suffer in life. Her focus of attention is on the average middle-class American family and its members, but simultaneously the focus is on the American social culture that such families typify.