Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but grew up in North Carolina, as the daughter of an industrial chemist and social worker. The family lived among various Quaker communities in the rural south before settling in Raleigh, North Carolina. These years formed background for her Southern literary flavor, which is seen in the settings of her fiction. Also the writer Eudora Welty, who has depicted the Mississippi of her childhood, has influenced Tyler.

At the age of 19 Tyler graduated from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, where she twice won the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing. She became a member of Phi Beta Kappa and did post-graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Before settling in Baltimore, where she has lived for much of her adult life, Tyler was a bibliographer at Duke University, ordering books from the Soviet Union, and worked in the law library of McGill University. Tyler married in 1963; she and her husband have two daughters.