The Celo Community settlement was founded by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends, with community labor needs shared by the residents. Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. The eldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Because of her style and subject matter, she has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others. Tyler celebrates unremarkable Americans and the ordinary details of their everyday lives.

Her subject in all her novels has been the American family and marriage: the boredom and exasperating irritants endured by partners, children, siblings, parents the desire for freedom pulling against the tethers of attachments and conflicted love the evolution over time of familial love and sense of duty. While many of her characters have been described as quirky or eccentric, she has managed to make them seem real through skillfully fleshing out their inner lives in great depth. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her 'brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail' ( New York Times), and her 'rigorous and artful style' and 'astute and open language' (also, New York Times). In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. All three were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the third won it. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). Anne Tyler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic.

A spool of blue thread synopsis